Read Ebook: In the Open: Intimate Studies and Appreciations of Nature by Kirkham Stanton Davis

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rn in the Fatherland. I do not know if our affinity is greater with the bob-white and the ruffed grouse, which hear no call to depart, or with these nomads of the earth. In the coldest weather, redpolls, crossbills and snow-buntings come to us as to a land of plenty. This is near enough the equator for these hardy birds--this is their genial South. It is pleasant to reflect that the falling mercury, which deprives us of the last of the summer residents, will at the same time bring us some dweller in the far North which perhaps otherwise we should not see.

The advancing season makes itself known through the songsters; they have keener perceptions and receive other intimations than come to us. Day by day, as by appointment, they reappear from Florida, from the Amazon and the Orinoco, and make themselves at home again in northern pastures. I have come to look for the tree-swallows as regularly on the 1st of April, as for the oriole on the 10th of May, as if these were calendar events of real importance. Between the middle of April and the 20th of May lie the incomparable days of the migrating warblers--days of discovery and adventure, when the torpor of indifference slips away, and, like a subtle fire in the blood, is felt that enthusiasm the years do not diminish. When, at night, the small birds pass overhead, their faint silvery "tseeps" come out of the silence with a weird suggestion of voices from the unseen world.

Now, the days are full of pleasing suggestions because of little birds shyly flitting with plant-down and with rootlets and dried grasses. Some are unmistakably house-hunting, and the female turns herself about in the crotch of a limb, trying if it be of the right proportions. Interest in bird life centers about this season. This is their life; the rest is a preparation or a waiting. It is only natural there should be an air of secrecy about them now. They are doing their best to conceal and elude, as indeed they must, and this necessity, being uppermost in their minds, becomes evident in their manner.

While I am watching a pair of pewees gather lichens from an old maple for their beautiful shallow nest, the barn-swallows shoot by with mud for their adobe huts. Now and then one pulls from the mud a few fine rootlets--perhaps of the white violet or gold thread growing there--and carries them off. They evidently know their trade. A chestnut warbler appears with some plant-fiber in her bill, and gives a cluck of surprise and disgust to find some one on the ground where she thought to have her secluded and private estate. She hesitates with the down still in her bill; it is evident what she must be thinking; but at length she decides to risk it, and enters the huckleberries. She has, of course, gone into the bushes a long way from the nest. One has great sympathy with the birds in their little circumventions and dissimulations, knowing their tribulations. They live among their numerous foes much as did the early settlers in this land,--that is to say, in spite of them. The weasel, the owl, and the cat--the terrible cat--are appointed to decimate the population of birds.

In the several nests of warblers, I am observing, the thrifty housewife is evidently the home-builder, whereas the male seems to take it upon himself merely to cheer and encourage her. After she has constructed a framework she settles herself in this and builds the wall around her, quite as if she were fitting a garment to herself. Her little ways while so engaged are distinctly feminine. To think that she has never been taught her trade, has perhaps never before fitted such a garment, and she is already deft and expert! The pair seem to take an almost human satisfaction in their home. Now and again they appear to talk it over together. Who can doubt they have some pleasure in this preparation, that they have bird-plans and bird-hopes?

We do not really know, a bird till we have found its nest and seen it at home. When I came upon the nest of the snowbird in the midst of a clearing in the mountains, it was like visiting the house for the first time of one I had known for years--a person of some distinction at that. It was placed high and dry on a tussock in a flaming patch of hawkweed. She had an eye for the practical, and knew better than to put her house where the cellar might be flooded. The four greenish mottled eggs were her one priceless treasure, which was to her as life itself. They were warm, and the whole aspect of the nest was sweet and inviting. It appeared to breathe some feminine element, so dainty was it, so begirt with flowers.

A humming-bird's nest that I have been watching the present season is placed on a pitch pinecone, and appears to a casual view to be the cone itself. It seems as if the bird had it in mind to simulate this or she would not have chosen such a peculiar site, for it affords no advantage from a structural point of view. If this be true it is a departure from all traditions, and shows a bird of some character and originality. In other respects it is like any humming-bird's nest--one of the most exquisite of all natural objects.

In the course of ten days, in place of one of the eggs appeared a small and peculiarly homely object which resembled a spider as much as anything. Two days later the other egg was hatched. At this stage the bills of the young birds were very short, but day by day they lengthened and grew more needlelike. At length one bird opened its minute and shining black eyes for the first time. The other fell from the nest on the following day, before its eyes were opened, so that all it had known of life was the consciousness of hunger.

The female fed her young with much less frequency than do other birds. When so engaged she perched upon the rim of the nest and pumped the food into them after the manner of her kind. As she flew to and fro, she appeared to move always at the same speed, as if her wings were keyed to a definite rate of vibration and could not vary. Gradually the young bird emerged from its gruesome infancy, and day by day became more sylphlike. Heavy winds prevailed, but the diminutive cradle remained unharmed, though branches were everywhere blown from the trees. So was the wind tempered in that case at least, till one day the sylph left the nest, as a thistle-down might detach itself and sail away on the breeze.

Birds have their home-trees, and one whose traditions are of the pine is not drawn to build in hardwoods. The woodthrush is associated with the dogwood, as the catbird with the smilax, and the oriole with the elm. There are ancient apple orchards which have come to serve only the bees and the birds; but what temples of music in May with the hum of bees, and in June with the song of wrens! At this season you cannot do better than to set out for one of these old-time orchards, neglected of man and favored of heaven.

The virile hum of honey-and carpenter-bees descends from the flowery summits to the listener beneath, the contented music of a race dwelling overhead and nearer the skies than we. It is such an apple--Baldwin, pippin, or russet--gnarled and archaic in trunk and a bower of beauty above, which becomes the home-tree of that feathered gnome, the house-wren, a sprightly elf, living in the depths of a tree trunk and yet full to the brim of song. He may derive of the flowing sap some genial trait and takes to the apple as a swift to the chimney, or a redwing to the swamp. After the cold rains of late May have taken off the blossoms and with them the bees, the place becomes melodious with his song. It is thenceforth his estate, and he dominates it with his small personality. With him his house is his castle, and in true medieval fashion he barricades his door. Within is snug enough, but without it has a feudal and forbidding look,--a formidable barrier of twigs, erected perhaps against the house-sparrow or for fear the robber-owl may peer too closely.

In this choice of a building site the bird reveals something of itself. Contrast the wren with the phoebe, a cliff-dweller, loving the contact of the ledge itself better than any bush or tree. The song-sparrow has an eye for the wild rose and the yellow warbler for apple blossoms, but the phoebe has some austere traits which make the stern rock more congenial to her. Some birds are architects, others builders merely. The vireos are a family of artists, whereas the improvident cuckoo will not even lay a proper floor to her nest.

A look into some nests is a glance at the domestic life of a savage people, and yet we find the virtues we most esteem--patience, perseverance and fortitude. Hour in and hour out the faithful kingfisher flies from the nest to the fishing-ground, bringing each time a small fish. He is a primitive and industrious fisherman who gets an honest living by his skill and supports his family, yet he is under ban, while the dilettante whips the stream for his pleasure. The hoarse rattle of the kingfisher is an altogether barbarous chant with which he beguiles himself as with a hunting song. His is an austere temperament with no room for melody. But that he returns every year to the same nest--the ancestral hall--is evidence of some more domestic and kindly trait in his character.

This nest is an excavation in the sand, high in a bluff, and is perhaps five feet deep,--a true cave, and its inmate a cave-dweller. We have thus both cave-and cliff-dwellers among us--primitive states of man still exemplified by birds. The cave-dweller had something in common with the kingfisher, which led him to burrow in the earth for a home.

That was truly an aboriginal abode which I came upon in the spruce woods in a region of perpetual twilight. The somber spruce was relieved only by some veteran yellow birches and by ghostly patches of false miterwort on a projecting ledge. High in a birch was a small hole from which the scarlet crown and chin of a sapsucker appeared in view, as the bird thrust out his head and looked inquiringly about. A harsh imperious call brought the female, who clung to the trunk till the male came out, whereupon she dived into the hole herself, while he in turn went foraging.

Whenever the pair were absent from the nest the insatiable young were heard squealing within. It was a fearsome place that was home to these young savages, a room within a tower, lighted by a single small window far above. To think of being born and raised in the dark heart of a tree! The old birds called to each other from time to time as they hunted over the neighborhood, and their speech was as that of wild men, the very rudiments of language--rude, uncouth and evidently of few words. But, as with the speech of savages, these words were doubtless packed with meaning, whole sentences and paragraphs in themselves, of hard and practical import. Now and then the scarlet crown appeared at the entrance of the dark wigwam. Any lurking foe would be espied from there. Probably not a twig moved below but it was noticed.

While the robin and the bluebird have come to wear a half domestic look, the woodpecker is the untutored savage still. As an Indian remains an Indian, a woodpecker remains a woodpecker. When he comes to the orchard he is an interloper from the forest. He carries the stamp of the wilderness with him. Defiance is in the poise of his head; his attitude is a challenge.

The owlets took their beetles with avidity, swallowing them whole and gulping and gagging in the process in a manner indicative of discomfit rather than any satisfaction over the meal. Once the mother brought what in the darkness appeared to be a small mouse, and this too was swallowed by one little owl, but only after heroic and protracted efforts.

It was no great matter on the following day to gain the confidence of the young owls to a slight degree. But food was the only bond of affinity. So long as I fed them they were content to perch on my finger, fierce and solemn little ruffians, and devour bits of raw meat. Their manners remained sullen and forbidding, though they never refused to eat. Soon they lost even this slight contact with our world and disappeared into their own--the nocturnal and barbarous world of the owl.

Every year there is fresh evidence that the course of true love runs far from smoothly with the birds. A pair of yellow-throated vireos built no less than three nests one season and only succeeded in occupying the last. There were two suitors for the affection of the female, and they fought continually. The rejected lover harassed the pair while at work gathering material, and that he twice stole a march on them and actually tore down the nest appears from circumstantial evidence.

Great secrecy was observed in constructing the third nest, and the rejected one no longer harassed them. Either he had transferred his affections or been fairly vanquished. Life was strenuous and impassioned with these little birds, but see what constancy and perseverance! Fancy having two houses torn down, after completing them with your own hands, and having the courage to build still a third! There is something of the pioneer and frontiersman in this. The offspring of this pair were the children of vigorous and romantic times, and should have inherited some heroic traits.

Even if all goes well otherwise, the sanctity of the nest is liable to be profaned by the cowbird. This spring was an unusually favorable one for them. I noticed the least flycatcher and the Maryland yellow-throat mothering young cowbirds, and many vireos and warblers so engaged. It is a wary caution that leads the cowbird to choose the smaller birds for her victims.

The yellow warbler is perhaps the oftenest chosen. Accessible and easily found, the nest is a beautiful cup-shaped structure lodged in the fork of a fruit tree, with perchance a spray of blossoms just over it--a house of silk, a satin bower. How awkward and uncouth must the cowbird appear squatting on this fragile silken thing to lay her eggs! Doubtless she watches the yellow bird stripping the dry grass stems and gathering the pappus of last year's cattails; squats low in the grass and looks all unconcerned while she marks the tree to which the fluffy material is carried, and bides her time till the nest is ready. Strange that she should never discover in herself the home-making instinct, for even nomads have their tents. Stranger still she should never once wish to undertake the duties of motherhood.

For a time, perhaps, the young cowbird is influenced by the habit of the bird that happens to mother it, whether this be a ground-sparrow or a tree-loving flycatcher. But it grows up a cowbird with all the inheritance of that peculiar tribe, and its brief contact with a superior race leaves no impress upon it.

In spite of cowbirds and the exigencies of life the woods are full of young birds, their tails not yet grown. This is their childhood--a brief one--as the days in the nest were their infancy. They are exacting children, yet they do not clamor to be amused, but only to be fed. I have seen a young chipping-sparrow, its tail half grown, showing how recently it was from the nest, pick up a straw and carry it about. So early does the maternal instinct show itself. This straw was its doll-baby, the only plaything it could know, and this its solemn play. There is a mild and innocent expression about young birds, as there is in the faces of children, apparent to a keen vision only. They have yet to be hardened by experience and vicissitude. The countenances of the old take on an astute and alert expression. These young black-and-white creepers and chestnut warblers, now shifting for themselves for the first time, come about with gentle confidence. They creep and flit through the trees, coming nearer and nearer, until you look directly into their small innocent faces and could put your hand upon them. Then as it would seem they were about to descend like blessings upon your head, they withdraw and recede from view into the wilderness of leaves where only your thoughts may follow them.

SONGS OF THE WOODS

Why is the hermit moved to be thus didactic, while in the fields beyond the field-sparrow lightly trills and the merry bobolink continually bubbles over with song? Such merry jingles, such uncontrollable outbursts of melody, such a rippling, bubbling medley as comes up from the meadows, while the thrush solemnly intones within the twilight shades of the woods! Surely in view of this we may speak of the temperament and the personality of birds. If the bobolink's medley is not evidence of a light heart, then are appearances deceptive indeed. Care rests easily--if at all--upon his hopeful nature, but the burden of his song is quite as well worth heeding as is that of the thrush. One is lyric, the other didactic. The bobolink communicates his joyous and irrepressible spirits, as the thrush his serene exaltation. It is certain the wood birds are of a different temperament from the field birds. Either they are influenced to their prevailing moods by their environments, or they are attracted thereto by their own peculiarities, as men are drawn to solitude or society.

It is not unprecedented for a bird to depart thus from its usual song and to improvise. You may detect even the jay in this mood, though it is wholly imitative with him. The love-song of the catbird and the autumn reverie of the song-sparrow are perhaps the best instances. I am not yet wholly familiar with the songs of the robin. It appears he is still studying music, and adds a phrase or varies a theme occasionally. He is the most romantic of the thrushes; his song is more personal and less spiritual than the others. When, in early spring, the robins sing together at sundown, there is an exquisite tenderness in their notes which accords with the sweet youthfulness of the year. It is later in the season, when his mate sits upon the nest, that the robin rises to the heights of lyric beauty and pours out his soul from the top of the tallest maple in the swamp,--a brave sweet love-song, sung with dignity and without hesitation, that all his world may hear.

At dawn he is moved a little more to the rapt and religious expression of the thrushes. Something there is in the solemnity of that hour which touches the hearts of all little birds. What it is we shall perhaps never know; shall never know enough of bird life to understand what emotions they may have which so powerfully sway them and become evident in their voices. The evidence is there; the cause is to be inferred. While the birds are everywhere more or less affected by the approaching day and give voice to their feelings, there appear to be musical centers in the bird world in which the expression is more concerted than in other localities,--favored sections where this hymn to Apollo is memorable indeed and hardly to be described. It is a great chant with all its solemnity, all its impressiveness.

Beginning with the desultory calls of wood-pewees, it is taken up by song-sparrows, robins and catbirds, dominated by the devotional song of the woodthrush who appears to act as chorister. Birds seem to congregate from near and far and to inspire one another to unusual efforts. The volume and stateliness of this chant, so measured and rhythmical, carries with it vibrations of power and cannot fail to communicate its influence to the listener, be he bird or man. Here is a multitude of birds actuated by a unity of purpose, impelled by a single motive, and though every one sings his own song, the myriad voices blend in one concordant whole. To arouse suddenly from a sound sleep in the woods at dawn while this chant is in progress, is like awakening in another sphere, where sings the choir celestial. We slip from sleep into the heaven of song, and it requires another awakening to bring us to consciousness of this actual world about us.

They are the troubadours these birds, the wanderers whose souls are in their voices. What bold romantic singers are the cardinal and the rose-breasted grosbeak--the lords of song! When the cardinal comes North he appears to feel out of his element and modestly withdraws. But in the South he dominates the swamp and adjoining cotton-fields with his rollicking, melodious voice. A gay minstrel, he compels attention. These voices of the cypress swamp are clear and bright in contrast with their dismal surroundings. The bell-like note of the tufted titmouse in the treetops, and the brave, cheery song of the Carolina wren lighten those fearsome shades. The wren carries his sunshine with him. There is no minor in his song; he is never discouraged, any more than the chickadee. Day after day that voice rings true--all's well with the world. Brave voices singing in the wilderness, they lighten vaster shades than any they know of, sound their note of courage and well-being for other ears than theirs. What blessed transformation from the songless ages--from that slimy reptilian world where was no music, no song--to this unpaid minstrelsy of the woods and fields! They have served us these many years--the sweet singers, the true birds of paradise, with power to lift us from our dull, unmelodious thoughts into their harmonious world.

All too soon the only bird notes are those of the redeye and the pewee. For music we have the tree-toads and cicada. The sounds of this season are rhythmic and vibratory--virile songs of the year's manhood--the mature year, lusty and vigorous. But how soon they dwindle and wane, despite this sonorous protestation, grow silent and slip into the sear and yellow, and thence into the leafless, the glittering, the sublime aspects of winter! The last of September brings with it just a reminder of the sweet and winsome sounds of spring. At this season the song-sparrow indulges in a wonderfully ecstatic reverie, a bit of wild melody charged with feeling as of some larger consciousness, some tribal memories of that musical race, now finding voice in the waning year. So continuous and varied is the theme, and withal so complex and involved as compared with his usual simple and positive lay, that one must look at him twice to make sure it is he, and not some unknown minstrel from a distant shore.

Autumn nights are melodious with a voice, which in the distance is so like that of the hyla of early spring, though softer and more throbbing, that it is often mistaken for a kind of tree-toad. Heard near at hand it is singularly clear and almost bell-like, though ventriloquial in its elusiveness and difficult to locate, for as you approach, it ceases and is taken up by another a short distance away. Even when standing directly in front of it, it appears to come from several directions. It was only after prowling the woods with a lantern that I discovered the identity of the sweet singer, a small insect of a pale green hue, not over an inch in length, looking like a sort of locust, though classed with the crickets. The translucent wings are of a delicate ivory-white and the antennae very long.

This cricket was hanging to the edge of a grape leaf when the rays of the lantern fell upon him. He perhaps took it for moonlight, for on a sudden the wings were erected until at right angles to the body, and then, as it were automatically, and with the precision of a pendulum, they moved to and fro, partly crossing their bases and thus scraping the veins of the middle portion--and the mysterious singer of the night stood revealed.

The quality of the tone--the timbre--suggests the sound made by rubbing the rim of a glass bowl, the horny plate of the wing giving it great resonance. It appears to be pitched to A below middle C, though some may be A sharp or even B. The overtones make it difficult to determine the pitch. The chirping keeps up a good part of the night, and in the wee small hours takes on an uncertain quaver, as if the little singer had fallen asleep and were droning drowsily in its slumbers.

An insect which may be the same one--certainly an allied species--has a day-song somewhat different from this song of the night, a shrilling in place of a chirp. This is made by elevating the wings in the same manner as at night, but instead of rubbing them one across the other in regular time, they are rapidly and continuously vibrated like an electric bell. The rapidity of the vibration raises the pitch, though the quality of the tone is but little different.

One feels some sympathy with these sweet singers of the fields in knowing what a little life is theirs, how short is the span. For the most part they have but a few months to sport in the sunshine. This epithalamium is at the same time a requiem. In October it rises, a universal threnody, the death-song of the insects. Over all the land, wasps and bees and butterflies fall like leaves. Death overtakes them on the wing. They lie down to sleep, like travelers lost in the snow.

WILD GARDENS

Improvement easily becomes an affectation, from which all healthy natures suffer periodic reactions that take them to the mountains and the forest, to those primeval estates loved of wild bees, of the phoebe and the wren. One feels a sympathy with those renegade plants known as garden escapes--star of Bethlehem, bouncing-bet, and the rest--which have run away from the garden for the freedom of the woods and highways. The conventionalities of spade and hoe are odious to them. They wander far from the assemblage of the elect; they will live wild and free, these Philistines, following the open road wherever it may lead, with a sort of tramp instinct. Even the staid and domestic apple will break away from the fold to seek the unregenerate society of the pastures.

The hemlock woods, the meadow and the bog are wild gardens which require no cultivating themselves, but only a certain cultivation and appreciation in us, which they repay with gentle and unfailing interest year after year. What we get from them will depend on what we take to them.

Flowers are nothing away from their haunts. We must have the field in which the clover blossomed--bees and all, the cranberry-bog, the mossy bank of the violet, the white birch on which the polyporus grew. Take, for example, the clintonia, solitary amidst fallen spruce logs on the mountain slope. Imagine it transferred to a trim garden! If you have really seen that flower of the solitudes, you have seen the mossy rock overhanging it, the spruce cones lying thick about; sniffed the balsam and heard the veery on the mountain. Or consider this mountain sheep pasture with its clumps of stunted spruce and balsam, its scattered boulders and patches of sensitive fern, its reddening sorrel and running cinquefoil; bluets lie over the ground like a light fall of snow; pasture stones are incrusted with parmelias and set in a frame of hair-cap moss and reindeer lichens, incomparable mosaics; wild strawberries nestle among dainty speedwells, half hidden under the bent grass. It is a whole, an homogeneous piece of work, like a tapestry. There is not a bog-rush nor a buttercup to be spared.

From the first fragrant spicebush to the last witch-hazel, no cultivated shrub is to be compared with them, for the virtue of the wild is not to be transplanted and is never imprisoned in flower-beds. These shrubs of the pasture have a personality derived from immemorial contact with the virgin and uncultivated soil. They have been nourished by the very juices of earth and by the bone and sinew of the mountains. If you would have the barberry, you must move the pasture itself. It is of wild gardens solely, an untamed and untamable beauty. And so it is with the dogwood, for what is this but sunshine in the May woods--rifts of light breaking here and there through the overarching green of oak and tulip trees? It were as easy to catch sunbeams as to carry this away.

The mountain is the mother of these wild gardens; a vigorous dame to bring forth so gentle a brood--as the slopes of Vesuvius produce a mellow wine which has taken only a kindly warmth from the raging heart of the volcano. All her fairest virtues have blossomed in her children; her graces would remain unsuspected but for them. Let the gods but fling down a bit of rock anywhere and presently, after a few ages, it shall dissolve into violets and anemones. Grind it to powder by the wayside and you have only made it into thistles and burdock; scatter it over the fields and it becomes daisies and sunflowers.

To the first flowers belongs a charm, the most exquisite of any, something tender and appealing, as though they enshrined the fairest virtues of the year--its modesty, its purity, its sweetness--in violets, anemones and bloodroot. This charm, so elusive, has never been described, nor shall be indeed. It is like music which is a language in itself and will bear no translation. The bee must approach these with some humility and more gentleness than is shown to the sturdy blossoms of summer. They are eminently the "gentle race" of flowers, born in the enchanted time.

Serenity dwells with the woodland flowers. There is about them some subtle refinement and exclusiveness. They appear fit symbols of lowliness and modesty. A strip of woodland beside the turnpike is like an ancient chapel left amid the din and hubbub of city streets. The sturdier plants, both coarse and gay, halt at the edge of the wood. Within, the light is subdued; nothing obtrudes upon the eye or ear. It is obvious that the cathedral had its origin in the forest. What a fair and devout congregation has jack-in-the-pulpit, where the Canada violet stands side by side with the medeola and the painted trillium. The medeola declines its unfertilized flower, so that its maiden life is hid from view beneath the tri-leaved canopy, and only in its mature and matronly days does it begin to ascend and take a position where the seed shall crown the plant and be in evidence. From what insect despoiler is this shy virgin so carefully hid?

It seems as if the light that penetrates these woods has undergone a change, or been deprived of some of its rays, so that the wood flowers are nourished by a finer food than the rest, as with ambrosia. It is perhaps the subdued light which inspires a certain solemn and hymn-like quality in the notes of wood birds, as in the thrushes and the altogether didactic tone of the redeye. There is here none of that self-assertiveness among the flowers that is to be observed among certain groups of plants; the competitive spirit is lacking. Solomon's-seal, bellworts and twisted-stalk, like medeola, are rather at pains to conceal themselves. There is no self-advertising among them. What could be more unassuming than goldthread and wood-sorrel? They live close to the soil of which they are the offspring--a rich, odorous soil, black with the accumulated nutriment of centuries. He must be in hot haste indeed who treads on a patch of mountain wood-sorrel, such is its mute, appealing beauty. It holds the eye and stays the foot of every saunterer in the woods.

But follow the by-roads in early summer and you shall have very different company. It is here you will find the sturdy travelers, who will go the length of any road in all weathers; and there are none more cheerful and uncomplaining. They have no fault to find; the world suits them very well. You must be prepared to greet mullein and burdock as equals. Here on the road they are as good as any; they hobnob with the rose. Wild carrot borders the dusty lanes with a fringe of lacework--a real lace from the deft hand of Nature. There is no brighter gold than the St.-John's-wort, albeit it will not pass current in the town.

The winds sow the fairest hedge by the roadside--the winds and the birds; it seems that they take kindly to these wayfarers. They are the good fairies who plant elder and blackberry and scatter the wild rose. Timothy and redtop and witch-grass are the very children of AEolus. The pollen-bearing wind mothers the grass and plantain; the seed-carrying wind distributes the thistle and willow. Birds are very willing to carry cherry-pits provided they may have the cherry for their trouble.

The breeze comes laden with thistle-down, such fragile craft embark on these untried seas with all sails set. The story of such a seed would read like a fairy tale. Has not the wind whispered daily to it as its silken sail was spread? And the seed has tugged at its moorings like any boat till these were loosed and she was off, beating in and out among the high blueberries and shadbushes of the pastures, at last sailing clear of all such reefs and ascending in air to drift out into the open. How it rises and falls on the currents, like a ship riding the long swells of the sea; again it drives free before the wind to settle down at last in some pasture. If, perchance, such a seed fall on stony ground it is no great matter. The marvelous silken sail will now fall away, for the craft has reached port, no more forever to sail these seas. On occasion one is caught in a spider's web, whereupon the spider comes out to see what luck. Evidently all is not fish that comes to her net. But the self-reliant crane's bill looks neither to bird nor beast nor again to the winds of heaven, for it does its own planting, flinging the seeds away with almost an intelligent and conscious action.

This relation between the wind and the plants of the field is an agreeable stimulus to the imagination, in a matter-of-fact day when fairies are not so common as of old. Consider how the breezes have blown the pollen of the pine and later are to help carry the seed. They thus serve the trees of the forest and the grass of the prairie. These same winds urge the fruit that it should leave the parent tree. "Come, follow us!" say they, and first gently draw, then roughly compel, till the apple falls. They whisper all through the summer to the leaves so green, and at length, on October days, draw them irresistibly.

Verily of wild gardens there is no end; our estates are without number. But among them all the mountain is unique, for to ascend is like going northward, and at the same time to reverse the season. One, which I climbed the middle of June, is little more than four thousand feet, and yet, whereas in the valley there were daisies and wild carrot, on the summit the wild red cherry was just in bloom. In that short distance one walked upward--or rather backward--from the middle of June to late April. Another four thousand feet would have carried one back into the depths of winter. The seasons are thus with us throughout the summer; we have only to go up in the air after them.

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