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[Illustration: Front cover]

[Illustration: Author]


Books by Mr. Torrey.

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.

A RAMBLER'S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.

  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
    BOSTON AND NEW YORK.


[Illustration: Title page]


THE FOOT-PATH WAY

BY

BRADFORD TORREY


    Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,
      And merrily hent the stile-a:
    A merry heart goes all the day,
      Your sad tires in a mile-a.

                     THE WINTER'S TALE


  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
    1893

  Copyright, 1892,
    BY BRADFORD TORREY.

_All rights reserved._

SECOND EDITION.

  _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
    Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.




CONTENTS.
                                  PAGE

JUNE IN FRANCONIA.                   1

DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS.              36

DYER'S HOLLOW.                      67

FIVE DAYS ON MOUNT MANSFIELD.       90

A WIDOW AND TWINS.                 111

THE MALE RUBY-THROAT.              135

ROBIN ROOSTS.                      153

THE PASSING OF THE BIRDS.          176

A GREAT BLUE HERON.                197

FLOWERS AND FOLKS.                 205

IN PRAISE OF THE WEYMOUTH PINE.    232




THE FOOT-PATH WAY.




JUNE IN FRANCONIA.

       "Herbs, fruits, and flowers,
    Walks, and the melody of birds."
                            MILTON.


There were six of us, and we had the entire hotel, I may almost say the
entire valley, to ourselves. If the verdict of the villagers could have
been taken, we should, perhaps, have been voted a queer set, familiar as
dwellers in Franconia are with the sight of idle tourists,--

    "Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
     And they were butterflies to wheel about
     Long as the summer lasted."

We were neither "rapid" nor "gay," and it was still only the first week
of June; if we were summer boarders, therefore, we must be of some
unusual early-blooming variety.

First came a lady, in excellent repute among the savants of Europe and
America as an entomologist, but better known to the general public as a
writer of stories. With her, as companion and assistant, was a doctor of
laws, who is also a newspaper proprietor, a voluminous author, an art
connoisseur, and many things beside. They had turned their backs thus
unseasonably upon the metropolis, and in this pleasant out-of-the-way
corner were devoting themselves to one absorbing pursuit,--the pursuit
of moths. On their daily drives, two or three insect nets dangled
conspicuously from the carriage,--the footman, thrifty soul, was never
backward to take a hand,--and evening after evening the hotel piazza was
illuminated till midnight with lamps and lanterns, while these
enthusiasts waved the same white nets about, gathering in geometries,
noctuids, sphinges, and Heaven knows what else, all of them to perish
painlessly in numerous "cyanide bottles," which bestrewed the piazza by
night, and (happy thought!) the closed piano by day. In this noble
occupation I sometimes played at helping; but with only meagre success,
my most brilliant catch being nothing more important than a "beautiful
Io." The kind-hearted lepidopterist lingered with gracious emphasis upon
the adjective, and assured me that the specimen would be all the more
valuable because of a finger-mark which my awkwardness had left upon one
of its wings. So--to the credit of human nature be it spoken--so does
amiability sometimes get the better of the feminine scientific spirit.
To the credit of human nature, I say; for, though her practice of the
romancer's art may doubtless have given to this good lady some peculiar
flexibility of mind, some special, individual facility in subordinating
a lower truth to a higher, it surely may be affirmed, also, of humanity
in general, that few things become it better than its inconsistencies.

Of the four remaining members of the company, two were botanists, and
two--for the time--ornithologists. But the botanists were lovers of
birds, also, and went nowhere without opera-glasses; while the
ornithologists, in turn, did not hold themselves above some elementary
knowledge of plants, and amused themselves with now and then pointing
out some rarity--sedges and willows were the special desiderata--which
the professional collectors seemed in danger of passing without notice.
All in all, we _were_ a queer set. How the Latin and Greek polysyllables
flew about the dining-room, as we recounted our forenoon's or
afternoon's discoveries! Somebody remarked once that the waiters' heads
appeared to be more or less in danger; but if the waiters trembled at
all, it was probably not for their own heads, but for ours.[1]

[1] Just how far the cause of science was advanced by all this activity
I am not prepared to say. The first ornithologist of the party published
some time ago (in _The Auk_, vol. v. p. 151) a list of our Franconia
birds, and the results of the botanists' researches among the willows
have appeared, in part at least, in different numbers of the _Bulletin
of the Torrey Botanical Club_. As for the lepidopterist, I have an
indistinct recollection that she once wrote to me of having made some
highly interesting discoveries among her Franconia collections,--several
undescribed species, as well as I can now remember; but she added that
it would be useless to go into particulars with a correspondent
entomologically so ignorant.

Our first excursion--I speak of the four who traveled on foot--was to
the Franconia Notch. It could not well have been otherwise; at all
events, there was one of the four whose feet would not willingly have
carried him in any other direction. The mountains drew us, and there was
no thought of resisting their attraction.

Love and curiosity are different, if not incompatible, sentiments; and
the birds that are dearest to the man are, for that very reason, not
most interesting to the ornithologist. When on a journey, I am almost
without eyes or ears for bluebirds and robins, song sparrows and
chickadees. Now is my opportunity for extending my acquaintance, and
such every-day favorites must get along for the time as best they can
without my attention. So it was here in Franconia. The vesper sparrow,
the veery, and a host of other friends were singing about the hotel and
along the roadside, but we heeded them not. Our case was like the boy's
who declined gingerbread, when on a visit: he had plenty of that at
home.

When we were nearly at the edge of the mountain woods, however, we heard
across the field a few notes that brought all four of us to an instant
standstill. What warbler could that be? Nobody could tell. In fact,
nobody could guess. But, before the youngest of us could surmount the
wall, the singer took wing, flew over our heads far into the woods, and
all was silent. It was too bad; but there would be another day
to-morrow. Meantime, we kept on up the hill, and soon were in the old
forest, listening to bay-breasted warblers, Blackburnians, black-polls,
and so on, while the noise of the mountain brook on our right, a better
singer than any of them, was never out of our ears. "You are going up,"
it said. "I wish you joy. But you see how it is; you will soon have to
come down again."

I took leave of my companions at Profile Lake, they having planned an
all-day excursion beyond, and started homeward by myself. Slowly, and
with many stops, I sauntered down the long hill, through the forest (the
stops, I need not say, are commonly the major part of a naturalist's
ramble,--the golden beads, as it were, the walk itself being only the
string), till I reached the spot where we had been serenaded in the
morning by our mysterious stranger. Yes, he was again singing, this time
not far from the road, in a moderately thick growth of small trees,
under which the ground was carpeted with club-mosses, dog-tooth
violets, clintonia, linnaea, and similar plants. He continued to sing,
and I continued to edge my way nearer and nearer, till finally I was
near enough, and went down on my knees. Then I saw him, facing me,
showing white under parts. A Tennessee warbler! Here was good luck
indeed. I ogled him for a long time ("Shoot it," says Mr. Burroughs,
authoritatively, "not ogle it with a glass;" but a man must follow his
own method), impatient to see his back, and especially the top of his
head. What a precious frenzy we fall into at such moments! My knees were
fairly upon nettles. He flew, and I followed. Once more he was under the
glass, but still facing me. How like a vireo he looked! For one instant
I thought, Can it be the Philadelphia vireo? But, though I had never
seen that bird, I knew its song to be as different as possible from the
notes to which I was listening. After a long time the fellow turned to
feeding, and now I obtained a look at his upper parts,--the back olive,
the head ashy, like the Nashville warbler. That was enough. It was
indeed the Tennessee (_Helminthophila peregrina_), a bird for which I
had been ten years on the watch.

The song, which has not often been described, is more suggestive of the
Nashville's than of any other, but so decidedly different as never for a
moment to be confounded with it. "When you hear it," a friend had said
to me several years before, "you will know it for something new." It is
long (I speak comparatively, of course), very sprightly, and peculiarly
staccato, and is made up of two parts, the second quicker in movement
and higher in pitch than the first. I speak of it as in two parts,
though when my companions came to hear it, as they did the next day,
they reported it as in three. We visited the place together afterwards,
and the discrepancy was readily explained. As to pitch, the song _is_ in
three parts, but as to rhythm and character, it is in two; the first
half being composed of double notes, the second of single notes. The
resemblance to the Nashville's song lies entirely in the first part; the
notes of the concluding portion are not run together or jumbled, after
the Nashville's manner, but are quite as distinct as those of the
opening measure.

As there were at least two pairs of the birds, and they were
unmistakably at home, we naturally had hope of finding one of the nests.
We made several random attempts, and one day I devoted an hour or more
to a really methodical search; but the wily singer gave me not the
slightest clue, behaving as if there were no such thing as a bird's nest
within a thousand miles, and all my endeavors went for nothing.

As might have been foreseen, Franconia proved to be an excellent place
in which to study the difficult family of flycatchers. All our common
eastern Massachusetts species were present,--the kingbird, the phoebe,
the wood pewee, and the least flycatcher,--and with them the crested
flycatcher (not common), the olive-sided, the traill, and the
yellow-bellied. The phoebe-like cry of the traill was to be heard
constantly from the hotel piazza. The yellow-bellied seemed to be
confined to deep and rather swampy woods in the valley, and to the
mountain-side forests; being most numerous on Mount Lafayette, where it
ran well up toward the limit of trees. In his notes, the yellow-belly
may be said to take after both the least flycatcher and the wood pewee.
His _killic_ (so written in the books, and I do not know how to improve
upon it) resembles the _chebec_ of the least flycatcher, though much
less emphatic, as well as much less frequently uttered, while his
_twee_, or _tuwee_, is quite in the voice and manner of the wood pewee's
clear, plaintive whistle; usually a monosyllable, but at other times
almost or quite dissyllabic. The olive-sided, on the other hand,
imitates nobody; or, if he does, it must be some bird with which I have
yet to make acquaintance. _Que-que-o_ he vociferates, with a strong
emphasis and drawl upon the middle syllable. This is his song, or what
answers to a song, but I have seen him when he would do nothing but
repeat incessantly a quick trisyllabic call, _whit, whit, whit_;
corresponding, I suppose, to the well-known _whit_ with which the
phoebe sometimes busies himself in a similar manner.

Of more interest than any flycatcher--of more interest even than the
Tennessee warbler--was a bird found by the roadside in the village,
after we had been for several days in the place. Three of us were
walking together, talking by the way, when all at once we halted, as by
a common impulse, at the sound of a vireo song; a red-eye's song, as it
seemed, with the faintest touch of something unfamiliar about it. The
singer was in a small butternut-tree close upon the sidewalk, and at
once afforded us perfectly satisfactory observations, perching on a low
limb within fifteen feet of our eyes, and singing again and again, while
we scrutinized every feather through our glasses. As one of my
companions said, it was like having the bird in your hand. There was no
room for a question as to its identity. At last we had before us the
rare and long-desired Philadelphia greenlet. As its song is little
known, I here transcribe my notes about it, made at two different times,
between which there appears to have been some discussion among us as to
just how it should be characterized:--

"The song is very pretty, and is curiously compounded of the red-eye's
and the solitary's, both as to phrase and quality. The measures are all
brief; with fewer syllables, that is to say, than the red-eye commonly
uses. Some of them are exactly like the red-eye's, while others have
the peculiar sweet upward inflection of the solitary's. To hear some of
the measures, you would pass the bird for a red-eye; to hear others of
them, you might pass him for a solitary. At the same time, he has not
the most highly characteristic of the solitary's phrases. His voice is
less sharp and his accent less emphatic than the red-eye's, and, so far
as we heard, he observes decidedly longer rests between the measures."

This is under date of June 16th. On the following day I made another
entry:--

"The song is, I think, less varied than either the solitary's or the
red-eye's, but it grows more distinct from both as it is longer heard.
Acquaintance will probably make it as characteristic and unmistakable as
any of our four other vireo songs. But I do not withdraw what I said
yesterday about its resemblance to the red-eye's and the solitary's. The
bird seems quite fearless, and keeps much of the time in the lower
branches. In this latter respect his habit is in contrast with that of
the warbling vireo."

On the whole, then, the song of the Philadelphia vireo comes nearest to
the red-eye's, differing from it mainly in tone and inflection rather
than in form. In these two respects it suggests the solitary vireo,
though it never reproduces the indescribably sweet cadence, the real
"dying fall," of that most delightful songster. At the risk of a seeming
contradiction, however, I must mention one curious circumstance. On
going again to Franconia, a year afterwards, and, naturally, keeping my
ears open for _Vireo philadelphicus_, I discovered that I was never for
a moment in doubt when I heard a red-eye; but once, on listening to a
distant solitary,--catching only part of the strain,--I was for a little
quite uncertain whether he might not be the bird for which I was
looking. How this fact is to be explained I am unable to say; it will be
least surprising to those who know most of such matters, and at all
events I think it worth recording as affording a possible clue to some
future observer. The experience, inconsistent as the assertion may
sound, does not in the least alter my opinion that the Philadelphia's
song is practically certain to be confused with the red-eye's rather
than with the solitary's. Upon that point my companions and I were
perfectly agreed while we had the bird before us, and Mr. Brewster's
testimony is abundantly conclusive to the same effect. He was in the
Umbagog forests on a special hunt for Philadelphia vireos (he had
collected specimens there on two previous occasions), and after some
days of fruitless search discovered, almost by accident, that the birds
had all the while been singing close about him, but in every instance
had passed for "nothing but red-eyes."[2]

[2] _Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club_, vol. v. p. 3.

For the benefit of the lay reader, I ought, perhaps, to have explained
before this that the Philadelphia vireo is in coloration an exact copy
of the warbling vireo. There is a slight difference in size between the
two, but the most practiced eye could not be depended upon to tell them
apart in a tree. _Vireo philadelphicus_ is in a peculiar case: it looks
like one common bird, and sings like another. It might have been
invented on purpose to circumvent collectors, as the Almighty has been
supposed by some to have created fossils on purpose to deceive ungodly
geologists. It is not surprising, therefore, that the bird escaped the
notice of the older ornithologists. In fact, it was first
described,--by Mr. Cassin,--in 1851, from a specimen taken, nine years
before, near Philadelphia; and its nest remained unknown for more than
thirty years longer, the first one having been discovered, apparently in
Canada, in 1884.[3]

[3] E. E. T. Seton, in _The Auk_, vol. ii. p. 305.

Day after day, the bare, sharp crest of Mount Lafayette silently invited
my feet. Then came a bright, favorable morning, and I set out. I would
go alone on this my first pilgrimage to the noble peak, at which, always
from too far off, I had gazed longingly for ten summers. It is not
inconsistent with a proper regard for one's fellows, I trust, to enjoy
now and then being without their society. It _is_ good, sometimes, for a
man to be alone,--especially on a mountain-top, and more especially at a
first visit. The trip to the summit was some seven or eight miles in
length, and an almost continual ascent, without a dull step in the whole
distance. The Tennessee warbler was singing; but perhaps the pleasantest
incident of the walk to the Profile House--in front of which the
mountain footpath is taken--was a Blackburnian warbler perched, as
usual, at the very top of a tall spruce, his orange throat flashing fire
as he faced the sun, and his song, as my notebook expresses it, "sliding
up to high _Z_ at the end" in his quaintest and most characteristic
fashion. I spent nearly three hours in climbing the mountain path, and
during all that time saw and heard only twelve kinds of birds:
redstarts, Canada warblers (near the base), black-throated blues,
black-throated greens, Nashvilles, black-polls, red-eyed vireos,
snowbirds (no white-throated sparrows!), winter wrens, Swainson and
gray-cheeked thrushes, and yellow-bellied flycatchers. Black-poll and
Nashville warblers were especially numerous, as they are also upon Mount
Washington, and, as far as I have seen, upon the White Mountains
generally. The feeble, sharp song of the black-poll is a singular
affair; short and slight as it is, it embraces a perfect crescendo and a
perfect decrescendo. Without question I passed plenty of white-throated
sparrows, but by some coincidence not one of them announced himself. The
gray-cheeked thrushes, which sang freely, were not heard till I was
perhaps halfway between the Eagle Cliff Notch and the Eagle Lakes. This
species, so recently added to our summer fauna, proves to be not
uncommon in the mountainous parts of New England, though apparently
confined to the spruce forests at or near the summits. I found it
abundant on Mount Mansfield, Vermont, in 1885, and in the summer of 1888
Mr. Walter Faxon surprised us all by shooting a specimen on Mount
Graylock, Massachusetts. Doubtless the bird has been singing its
perfectly distinctive song in the White Mountain woods ever since the
white man first visited them. During the vernal migration, indeed, I
have more than once heard it sing in eastern Massachusetts. My latest
delightful experience of this kind was on the 29th of May last (1889),
while I was hastening to a railway train within the limits of Boston.
Preoccupied as I was, and faintly as the notes came to me, I recognized
them instantly; for while the gray-cheek's song bears an evident
resemblance to the veery's (which I had heard within five minutes), the
two are so unlike in pitch and rhythm that no reasonably nice ear ought
ever to confound them. The bird was just over the high, close,
inhospitable fence, on the top of which I rested my chin and watched and
listened. He sat with his back toward me, in full view, on a level with
my eye, and sang and sang and sang, in a most deliciously soft, far-away
voice, keeping his wings all the while a little raised and quivering, as
in a kind of musical ecstasy. It does seem a thing to be regretted--yes,
a thing to be ashamed of--that a bird so beautiful, so musical, so
romantic in its choice of a dwelling-place, and withal so characteristic
of New England should be known, at a liberal estimate, to not more than
one or two hundred New Englanders! But if a bird wishes general
recognition, he should do as the robin does, and the bluebird, and the
oriole,--dress like none of his neighbors, and show himself freely in
the vicinity of men's houses. How can one expect to be famous unless he
takes a little pains to keep himself before the public?

From the time I left my hotel until I was fairly above the dwarf spruces
below the summit of Lafayette, I was never for many minutes together out
of the hearing of thrush music. Four of our five summer representatives
of the genus _Turdus_ took turns, as it were, in the serenade. The
veeries--Wilson's thrushes--greeted me before I stepped off the piazza.
As I neared the Profile House farm, the hermits were in tune on either
hand. The moment the road entered the ancient forest, the olive-backs
began to make themselves heard, and halfway up the mountain path the
gray-cheeks took up the strain and carried it on to its heavenly
conclusion. A noble processional! Even a lame man might have climbed to
such music. If the wood thrush had been here, the chorus would have been
complete,--a chorus not to be excelled, according to my untraveled
belief, in any quarter of the world.

To-day, however, my first thoughts were not of birds, but of the
mountain. The weather was all that could be asked,--the temperature
perfect, and the atmosphere so transparent as to be of itself a kind of
lens; so that in the evening, when I rejoined my companions at the
hotel, I found to my astonishment that I had been plainly visible while
at the summit, the beholders having no other help than an opera-glass!
It was almost past belief. I had felt some dilation of soul, it was
true, but had been quite unconscious of any corresponding physical
transformation. What would our aboriginal forerunners have said could
they have stood in the valley and seen a human form moving from point to
point along yonder sharp, serrated ridge? I should certainly have passed
for a god! Let us be thankful that all such superstitious fancies have
had their day. The Indian, poor child of nature,

    "A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,"

stood afar off and worshiped toward these holy hills; but the white man
clambers gayly up their sides, guide-book in hand, and leaves his
sardine box and eggshells--and likely enough his business card--at the
top. Let us be thankful, I repeat, for the light vouchsafed to us; ours
is a goodly heritage; but there are moods--such creatures of hereditary
influence are we--wherein I would gladly exchange both the guide-book
and the sardine box for a vision, never so indistinct and transient, of
Kitche Manitoo. Alas! what a long time it is since any of us have been
able to see the invisible. "In the mountains," says Wordsworth, "did he
feel his faith." But the poet was speaking then of a very old-fashioned
young fellow, who, even when he grew up, made nothing but a peddler. Had
he lived in our day, he would have felt not his faith, but his own
importance; especially if he had put himself out of breath, as most
likely he would have done, in accomplishing in an hour and forty minutes
what, according to the guide-book, should have taken a full hour and
three quarters. The modern excursionist (how Wordsworth would have loved
that word!) has learned wisdom of a certain wise fowl who once taught
St. Peter a lesson, and who never finds himself in a high place without
an impulse to flap his wings and crow.

For my own part, though I spent nearly three hours on the less than four
miles of mountain path, as I have already acknowledged, I was
nevertheless somewhat short-winded at the end. So long as I was in the
woods, it was easy enough to loiter; but no sooner did I leave the last
low spruces behind me than I was seized with an importunate desire to
stand upon the peak, so near at hand just above me. I hope my readers
are none of them too old to sympathize with the boyish feeling. At all
events, I quickened my pace. The distance could not be more than half a
mile, I thought. But it was wonderful how that perverse trail among the
boulders did unwind itself, as if it never would come to an end; and I
was not surprised, on consulting a guide-book afterwards, to find that
my half mile had really been a mile and a half. One's sensations in such
a case I have sometimes compared with those of an essay-writer when he
is getting near the end of his task. He dallied with it in the
beginning, and was half ready to throw it up in the middle; but now the
fever is on him, and he cannot drive the pen fast enough. Two days ago
he doubted whether or not to burn the thing; now it is certain to be his
masterpiece, and he must sit up till morning, if need be, to finish it.
What would life be worth without its occasional enthusiasm, laughable in
the retrospect, perhaps, but in itself pleasurable almost to the point
of painfulness?

It was a glorious day. I enjoyed the climb, the lessening forest, the
alpine plants (the diapensia was in full flower, with its upright snowy
goblets, while the geum and the Greenland sandwort were just beginning
to blossom), the magnificent prospect, the stimulating air, and, most of
all, the mountain itself. I sympathized then, as I have often done at
other times, with a remark once made to me by a Vermont farmer's wife. I
had sought a night's lodging at her house, and during the evening we
fell into conversation about Mount Mansfield, from the top of which I
had just come, and directly at the base of which the farmhouse stood.
When she went up "the mounting," she said, she liked to look off, of
course; but somehow what she cared most about was "the mounting itself."

The woman had probably never read a line of Wordsworth, unless possibly,
"We are Seven" was in the old school reader; but I am sure the poet
would have liked this saying, especially as coming from such a source.
_I_ liked it, at any rate, and am seldom on a mountain-top without
recalling it. Her lot had been narrow and prosaic,--bitterly so, the
visitor was likely to think; she was little used to expressing herself,
and no doubt would have wondered what Mr. Pater could mean by his talk
about natural objects as possessing "more or less of a moral or
spiritual life," as "capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse."
From such refinements and subtleties her mind would have taken refuge in
thoughts of her baking and ironing. But she enjoyed the mountain; I
think she had some feeling for it, as for a friend; and who knows but
she, too, was one of "the poets that are sown by Nature"?

I spent two happy hours and a half at the summit of Lafayette. The
ancient peak must have had many a worthier guest, but it could never
have entertained one more hospitably. With what softly temperate breezes
did it fan me! I wish I were there now! But kind as was its welcome, it
did not urge me to remain. The word of the brook came true again,--as
Nature's words always do, if we hear them aright. Having gone as high as
my feet could carry me, there was nothing left but to go down again.
"Which things," as Paul said to the Galatians, "are an allegory."

I was not asked to stay, but I was invited to come again; and the next
season, also in June, I twice accepted the invitation. On the first of
these occasions, although I was eight days later than I had been the
year before (June 19th instead of June 11th), the diapensia was just
coming into somewhat free bloom, while the sandwort showed only here and
there a stray flower, and the geum was only in bud. The dwarf paper
birch (trees of no one knows what age, matting the ground) was in
blossom, with large, handsome catkins, while Cutler's willow was already
in fruit, and the crowberry likewise. The willow, like the birch, has
learned that the only way to live in such a place is to lie flat upon
the ground and let the wind blow over you. The other flowers noted at
the summit were one of the blueberries (_Vaccinium uliginosum_),
Bigelow's sedge, and the fragrant alpine holy-grass (_Hierochloa
alpina_). Why should this sacred grass, which Christians sprinkle in
front of their church doors on feast-days, be scattered thus upon our
higher mountain-tops, unless these places are indeed, as the Indian and
the ancient Hebrew believed, the special abode of the Great Spirit?

But the principal interest of this my second ascent of Mount Lafayette
was to be not botanical, but ornithological. We had seen nothing
noteworthy on the way up (I was not alone this time, though I have so
far been rude enough to ignore my companion); but while at the Eagle
Lakes, on our return, we had an experience that threw me into a nine
days' fever. The other man--one of the botanists of last year's
crew--was engaged in collecting viburnum specimens, when all at once I
caught sight of something red in a dead spruce on the mountain-side just
across the tiny lake. I leveled my glass, and saw with perfect
distinctness, as I thought, two pine grosbeaks in bright male
costume,--birds I had never seen before except in winter. Presently a
third one, in dull plumage, came into view, having been hidden till now
behind the bole. The trio remained in sight for some time, and then
dropped into the living spruces underneath, and disappeared. I lingered
about, while my companion and the black flies were busy, and was on the
point of turning away for good, when up flew two red birds and alighted
in a tree close by the one out of which the grosbeaks had dropped. But
a single glance showed that they were not grosbeaks, but white-winged
crossbills! And soon they, too, were joined by a third bird, in female
garb. Here was a pretty piece of confusion! I was delighted to see the
crossbills, having never before had the first glimpse of them, summer or
winter; but what was I to think about the grosbeaks? "Your determination
is worthless," said my scientific friend, consolingly; and there was no
gainsaying his verdict. Yet by what possibility could I have been so
deceived? The birds, though none too near, had given me an excellent
observation, and as long as they were in sight I had felt no uncertainty
whatever as to their identity. The bill alone, of which I had taken
particular note, ought in all reason to be held conclusive. So much for
one side of the case. On the other hand, however, the second trio were
unmistakably crossbills. (They had been joined on the wing by several
others, as I ought to have mentioned, and with their characteristic
chattering cry had swept out of sight up the mountain). It was certainly
a curious coincidence: three grosbeaks--two males and a female--had
dropped out of a tree into the undergrowth; and then, five minutes
later, three crossbills--two males and a female--had risen out of the
same undergrowth, and taken almost the very perch which the others had
quitted! Had this strange thing happened? Or had my eyes deceived me?
This was my dilemma, on the sharp horns of which I tried alternately for
the next eight days to make myself comfortable.

During all that time, the weather rendered mountain climbing
impracticable. But the morning of the 28th was clear and cold, and I set
out forthwith for the Eagle Lakes. If the grosbeaks were there, I meant
to see them, though I should have to spend all day in the attempt. My
botanist had returned home, leaving me quite alone at the hotel; but, as
good fortune would have it, before I reached the Profile House, I was
overtaken unexpectedly by a young ornithological friend, who needed no
urging to try the Lafayette path. We were creeping laboriously up the
long, steep shoulder beyond the Eagle Cliff gorge, and drawing near the
lakes, when all at once a peculiarly sweet, flowing warble fell upon
our ears. "A pine grosbeak!" said I, in a tone of full assurance,
although this was my first hearing of the song. The younger man plunged
into the forest, in the direction of the voice, while I, knowing pretty
well how the land lay, hastened on toward the lakes, in hopes to find
the singer visible from that point. Just as I ran down the little
incline into the open, a bird flew past me across the water, and
alighted in a dead spruce (it might have been the very tree of nine days
before), where it sat in full sight, and at once broke into song,--"like
the purple finch's," says my notebook; "less fluent, but, as it seemed
to me, sweeter and more expressive. I think it was not louder." Before
many minutes, my comrade came running down the path in high glee,
calling, "Pine grosbeaks!" He had got directly under a tree in which two
of them were sitting. So the momentous question was settled, and I
commenced feeling once more a degree of confidence in my own eyesight.
The loss of such confidence is a serious discomfort; but, strange as it
may seem to people in general, I suspect that few field ornithologists,
except beginners, ever succeed in retaining it undisturbed for any long
time together. As a class, they have learned to take the familiar maxim,
"Seeing is believing," with several grains of allowance. With most of
them, it would be nearer the mark to say, Shooting is believing.

My special errand at the lakes being thus quickly disposed of, there was
no reason why I should not accompany my friend to the summit. Lafayette
gave us a cold reception. We might have addressed him as Daniel Webster,
according to the time-worn story, once addressed Mount Washington; but
neither of us felt oratorically inclined. In truth, after the outrageous
heats of the past few days, it seemed good to be thrashing our arms and
crouching behind a boulder, while we devoured our luncheon, and between
times studied the landscape. For my own part, I experienced a feeling of
something like wicked satisfaction; as if I had been wronged, and all at
once had found a way of balancing the score. The diapensia was already
quite out of bloom, although only nine days before we had thought it
hardly at its best. It is one of the prettiest and most striking of our
strictly alpine plants, but is seldom seen by the ordinary summer
tourist, as it finishes its course long before he arrives. The same may
be said of the splendid Lapland azalea, which I do not remember to have
found on Mount Lafayette, it is true, but which is to be seen in all its
glory upon the Mount Washington range, in middle or late June; so early
that one may have to travel over snow-banks to reach it. The two flowers
oftenest noticed by the chance comer to these parts are the Greenland
sandwort (the "mountain daisy"!) and the pretty geum, with its handsome
crinkled leaves and its bright yellow blossoms, like buttercups.

My sketch will hardly fulfill the promise of its title; for our June in
Franconia included a thousand things of which I have left myself no room
to speak: strolls in the Landaff Valley and to Sugar Hill; a walk to
Mount Agassiz; numerous visits--by the way, and in uncertain weather--to
Bald Mountain; several jaunts to Lonesome Lake; and wanderings here and
there in the pathless valley woods. We were none of us of that unhappy
class who cannot enjoy doing the same thing twice.

I wished, also, to say something of sundry minor enjoyments: of the
cinnamon roses, for example, with the fragrance of which we were
continually greeted, and which have left such a sweetness in the memory
that I would have called this essay "June in the Valley of Cinnamon
Roses," had I not despaired of holding myself up to so poetic a title.
And with the roses the wild strawberries present themselves. Roses and
strawberries! It is the very poetry of science that these should be
classified together. The berries, like the flowers, are of a generous
turn (it is a family trait, I think), loving no place better than the
roadside, as if they would fain be of refreshment to beings less happy
than themselves, who cannot be still and blossom and bear fruit, but are
driven by the Fates to go trudging up and down in dusty highways. For
myself, if I were a dweller in this vale, I am sure my finger-tips would
never be of their natural color so long as the season of strawberries
lasted. On one of my solitary rambles I found a retired sunny field,
full of them. To judge from appearances, not a soul had been near it.
But I noticed that, while the almost ripe fruit was abundant, there was
scarce any that had taken on the final tinge and flavor. Then I began to
be aware of faint, sibilant noises about me, and, glancing up, I saw
that the ground was already "pre-empted" by a company of cedar-birds,
who, naturally enough, were not a little indignant at my poaching thus
on their preserves. They showed so much concern (and had gathered the
ripest of the berries so thoroughly) that I actually came away the
sooner on their account. I began to feel ashamed of myself, and for once
in my life was literally hissed off the stage.

Even on my last page I must be permitted a word in praise of Mount
Cannon, of which I made three ascents. It has nothing like the celebrity
of Mount Willard, with which, from its position, it is natural to
compare it; but to my thinking it is little, if at all, less worthy. Its
outlook upon Mount Lafayette is certainly grander than anything Mount
Willard can offer, while the prospect of the Pemigewasset Valley, fading
away to the horizon, if less striking than that of the White Mountain
Notch, has some elements of beauty which must of necessity be lacking
in any more narrowly circumscribed scene, no matter how romantic.

In venturing upon a comparison of this kind, however, one is bound
always to allow for differences of mood. When I am in tune for such
things, I can be happier on an ordinary Massachusetts hilltop than at
another time I should be on any New Hampshire mountain, though it were
Moosilauke itself. And, truly, Fortune did smile upon our first visit to
Mount Cannon. Weather conditions, outward and inward, were right. We had
come mainly to look at Lafayette from this point of vantage; but, while
we suffered no disappointment in that direction, we found ourselves
still more taken with the valley prospect. We lay upon the rocks by the
hour, gazing at it. Scattered clouds dappled the whole vast landscape
with shadows; the river, winding down the middle of the scene, drew the
whole into harmony, as it were, making it in some nobly literal sense
picturesque; while the distance was of such an exquisite blue as I think
I never saw before.

How good life is at its best! And in such

                "charmed days,
    When the genius of God doth flow,"

what care we for science or the objects of science,--for grosbeak or
crossbill (may the birds forgive me!), or the latest novelty in willows?
I am often where fine music is played, and never without being
interested; as men say, I am pleased. But at the twentieth time, it may
be, something touches my ears, and I hear the music within the music;
and, for the hour, I am at heaven's gate. So it is with our appreciation
of natural beauty. We are always in its presence, but only on rare
occasions are our eyes anointed to see it. Such ecstasies, it seems, are
not for every day. Sometimes I fear they grow less frequent as we grow
older.

We will hope for better things; but, should the gloomy prognostication
fall true, we will but betake ourselves the more assiduously to lesser
pleasures,--to warblers and willows, roses and strawberries. Science
will never fail us. If worse comes to worst, we will not despise the
moths.




DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS.

    "December's as pleasant as May."
                            _Old Hymn._


For a month so almost universally spoken against, November commonly
brings more than its full proportion of fair days; and last year (1888)
this proportion was, I think, even greater than usual. On the 1st and
5th I heard the peeping of hylas; Sunday, the 4th, was enlivened by a
farewell visitation of bluebirds; during the first week, at least four
sorts of butterflies--Disippus, Philodice, Antiopa, and Comma--were on
the wing, and a single Philodice (our common yellow butterfly) was
flying as late as the 16th. Wild flowers of many kinds--not less than a
hundred, certainly--were in bloom; among them the exquisite little
pimpernel, or poor man's weather-glass. My daily notes are full of
complimentary allusions to the weather. Once in a while it rained, and
under date of the 6th I find this record,--"Everybody complaining of
the heat;" but as terrestrial matters go, the month was remarkably
propitious up to the 25th. Then, all without warning,--unless possibly
from the pimpernel, which nobody heeded,--a violent snow-storm descended
upon us. Railway travel and telegraphic communication were seriously
interrupted, while from up and down the coast came stories of shipwreck
and loss of life. Winter was here in earnest; for the next three months
good walking days would be few.

December opened with a mild gray morning. The snow had already
disappeared, leaving only the remains of a drift here and there in the
lee of a stone-wall; the ground was saturated with water; every meadow
was like a lake; and but for the greenness of the fields in a few
favored spots, the season might have been late March instead of early
December. Of course such hours were never meant to be wasted within
doors. So I started out, singing as I went,--

    "While God invites, how blest the day!"

But the next morning was pleasant likewise; and the next; and still the
next; and so the story went on, till in the end, omitting five days of
greater or less inclemency, I had spent nearly the entire month in the
open air. I could hardly have done better had I been in Florida.

All my neighbors pronounced this state of things highly exceptional;
many were sure they had never known the like. At the time I fully agreed
with them. Now, however, looking back over my previous year's notes, I
come upon such entries as these: "December 3d. The day has been warm.
Found chickweed and knawel in bloom, and an old garden was full of
fresh-looking <DW29>s." "4th. A calm, warm morning." "5th. Warm and
rainy." "6th. Mild and bright." "7th. A most beautiful winter day, mild
and calm." "8th. Even milder and more beautiful than yesterday." "11th.
Weather very mild since last entry. Pickering hylas peeping to-day."
"12th. Still very warm; hylas peeping in several places." "13th. Warm
and bright." "14th. If possible, a more beautiful day than yesterday."

So much for December, 1887. Its unexpected good behavior would seem to
have made a profound impression upon me; no doubt I promised never to
forget it; yet twelve months later traditionary notions had resumed
their customary sway, and every pleasant morning took me by surprise.

The winter of 1888-89 will long be famous in the ornithological annals
of New England as the winter of killdeer plovers. I have mentioned the
great storm of November 25th-27th. On the first pleasant morning
afterwards--on the 28th, that is--my out-of-door comrade and I made an
excursion to Nahant. The land-breeze had already beaten down the surf,
and the turmoil of the waters was in great part stilled; but the beach
was strewn with sea-weeds and eel-grass, and withal presented quite a
holiday appearance. From one motive and another, a considerable
proportion of the inhabitants of the city had turned out. The principal
attraction, as far as we could perceive, was a certain big clam, of
which great numbers had been cast up by the tide. Baskets and wagons
were being filled; some of the men carried off shells and all, while
others, with a celerity which must have been the result of much
practice, were cutting out the plump dark bodies, leaving the shells in
heaps upon the sand. The collectors of these molluscan dainties knew
them as quahaugs, and esteemed them accordingly; but my companion, a
connoisseur in such matters, pronounced them not the true quahaug
(_Venus mercenaria_,--what a profanely ill-sorted name, even for a
bivalve!) but the larger and coarser _Cyprina islandica_. The man to
whom we imparted this precious bit of esoteric lore received it like a
gentleman, if I cannot add like a scholar. "We _call_ them quahaugs," he
answered, with an accent of polite deprecation, as if it were not in the
least to be wondered at that he should be found in the wrong. It was
evident, at the same time, that the question of a name did not strike
him as of any vital consequence. _Venus mercenaria_ or _Cyprina
islandica_, the savoriness of the chowder was not likely to be seriously
affected.

It was good, I thought, to see so many people out-of-doors. Most of them
had employment in the shops, probably, and on grounds of simple economy,
so called, would have been wiser to have stuck to their lasts. But man,
after all that civilization has done for him (and against him), remains
at heart a child of nature. His ancestors may have been shoemakers for
fifty generations, but none the less he feels an impulse now and then to
quit his bench and go hunting, though it be only for a mess of clams.

Leaving the crowd, we kept on our way across the beach to Little Nahant,
the cliffs of which offer an excellent position from which to sweep the
bay in search of loons, old-squaws, and other sea-fowl. Here we
presently met two gunners. They had been more successful than most of
the sportsmen that one falls in with on such trips; between them they
had a guillemot, two horned larks, and a brace of large plovers, of some
species unknown to us, but noticeable for their bright cinnamon-
rumps. "Why couldn't _we_ have found those plovers, instead of that
fellow?" said my companion, as we crossed the second beach. I fear he
was envious at the prosperity of the wicked. But it was only a passing
cloud; for on reaching the main peninsula we were speedily arrested by
loud cries from a piece of marsh, and after considerable wading and a
clamber over a detestable barbed-wire fence, such as no rambler ever
encountered without at least a temptation to profanity, we caught sight
of a flock of about a dozen of the same unknown plovers. This was good
fortune indeed. We had no firearms, nor even a pinch of salt, and coming
shortly to a ditch, too wide for leaping and too deep for cold-weather
fording, we were obliged to content ourselves with opera-glass
inspection. Six of the birds were grouped in a little plot of grass,
standing motionless, like so many robins. Their novelty and their
striking appearance, with two conspicuous black bands across the breast,
their loud cries, and their curious movements and attitudes were enough
to drive a pair of enthusiasts half crazy. We looked and looked, and
then reluctantly turned away. On getting home we had no difficulty in
determining their identity, and each at once sent off to the other the
same verdict,--"killdeer plover."

This, as I say, was on the 28th of November. On the 3d of December we
were again at Nahant, eating our luncheon upon the veranda of some rich
man's deserted cottage, and at the same time enjoying the sunshine and
the beautiful scene.

It was a summery spot; moths were flitting about us, and two
grasshoppers leaped out of our way as we crossed the lawn. They showed
something less than summer liveliness, it is true; it was only
afterwards, and by way of contrast, that I recalled Leigh Hunt's

    "Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
     Catching his heart up at the feel of June."

But they had done well, surely, to weather the recent snow-storm and the
low temperature; for the mercury had been down to 10 deg. within a
fortnight, and a large snow-bank was still in sight against the wall.
Suddenly a close flock of eight or ten birds flew past us and
disappeared behind the hill. "Pigeons?" said my companion. I thought
not; they were sea-birds of some kind. Soon we heard killdeer cries from
the beach, and, looking up, saw the birds, three of them, alighting on
the sand. We started down the hill in haste, but just at that moment an
old woman, a miserable gatherer of drift rubbish, walked directly upon
them, and they made off. Then we saw that our "pigeons," or "sea-birds,"
had been nothing but killdeer plovers, which, like other long-winged
birds, look much larger in the air than when at rest. Returning towards
Lynn, later in the afternoon, we came upon the same three birds again;
this time feeding among the boulders at the end of the beach. We
remarked once more their curious, silly-looking custom of standing
stock-still with heads indrawn. But our own attitudes, as we also stood
stock-still with glasses raised, may have looked, in their eyes, even
more singular and meaningless. As we turned away--after flushing them
two or three times to get a view of their pretty cinnamon
rump-feathers--a sportsman came up, and proved to be the very man on
whose belt we had seen our first killdeers, a week before. We left him
doing his best to bag these three also. He will never read what I write,
and I need not scruple to confess that, seeing his approach, we
purposely startled the birds as badly as possible, hoping to see them
make off over the hill, out of harm's way. But the foolish creatures
could not take the hint, and alighted again within a few rods, at the
same time calling loudly enough to attract the attention of the gunner,
who up to this moment had not been aware of their presence. He fired
twice before we got out of sight, but, to judge from his motions,
without success. A man's happiness is perhaps of more value than a
plover's, though I do not see how we are to prove it; but my sympathies,
then as always, were with the birds.

Within a week or so I received a letter from Mrs. Celia Thaxter,
together with a wing, a foot, and one cinnamon feather. "By this wing
which I send you," she began, "can you tell me the name of the bird that
owned it?" Then after some description of the plumage, she continued:
"In the late tremendous tempest myriads of these birds settled on the
Isles of Shoals, filling the air with a harsh, shrill, incessant cry,
and not to be driven away by guns or any of man's inhospitable
treatment. Their number was so great as to be amazing, and they had
never been seen before by any of the present inhabitants of the Shoals.
They are plovers of some kind, I should judge, but I do not know." On
the 16th she wrote again: "All sorts of strange things were cast up by
the storm, and the plovers were busy devouring everything they could
find; always running, chasing each other, very quarrelsome, fighting
all the time. They were in poor condition, so lean that the men did not
shoot them after the first day, a fact which gives your correspondent
great satisfaction. They are still there! My brother came from the
Shoals yesterday, and says that the place is alive with them, all the
seven islands."

Similar facts were reported--as I began in one way and another to
learn--from different points along the coast; especially from Cape
Elizabeth, Maine, where hundreds of the birds were seen on the 28th and
29th of November. The reporter of this item[4] pertinently adds: "Such a
flight of killdeer in Maine--where the bird is well known to be
rare--has probably not occurred before within the memory of living
sportsmen." Here, as at the Isles of Shoals, the visitors were at first
easily shot (they are not counted among game birds where they are known,
on account of their habitual leanness, I suppose); but they had landed
upon inhospitable shores, and were not long in becoming aware of their
misfortune. In the middle of December one of our Cambridge
ornithologists went to Cape Cod on purpose to find them. He saw about
sixty birds, but by this time they were so wild that he succeeded in
getting only a single specimen. "Poor fellows!" he wrote me; "they
looked unhappy enough, that cold Friday, with the mercury at 12 deg. and
everything frozen stiff. Most of them were on hillsides and in the
hollows of pastures; a few were in the salt marshes, and one or two on
the beach." Nobody expected them to remain hereabouts, as they normally
winter in the West Indies and in Central and South America;[5] but every
little while Mrs. Thaxter wrote, "The killdeers are still here!" and on
the 21st of December, as I approached Marblehead Neck, I saw a bird
skimming over the ice that covered the small pond back of the beach. I
put up my glass and said to myself, "A killdeer plover!" There proved to
be two birds. They would not suffer me within gunshot,--though I carried
no gun,--but flew off into some ploughed ground, with their usual loud
vociferations. (The killdeer is aptly named _Aegialitis vocifera_.)

[4] Mr. N. C. Brown, in _The Auk_, January, 1889, page 69.

[5] It seems probable that the birds started from some point in the
Southern States for a long southward flight, or perhaps for the West
Indies, on the evening of November 24th, and on getting out to sea were
caught by the great gale, which whirled them northward over the
Atlantic, landing them--such of them, that is, as were not drowned on
the way--upon the coast of New England. The grounds for such an opinion
are set forth by Dr. Arthur P. Chadbourne in _The Auk_ for July, 1889,
page 255.

During the month with the history of which we are now especially
concerned, I saw nothing more of them; but by way of completing the
story I may add that on the 28th of January, in the same spot, I found a
flock of seven, and there they remained. I visited them four times in
February and once in March, and found them invariably in the same place.
Evidently they had no idea of making another attempt to reach the West
Indies for _this_ season; and if they were to remain in our latitude,
they could hardly have selected a more desirable location. The marsh, or
meadow, was sheltered and sunny, while the best protected corner was at
the same time one of those peculiarly springy spots in which the grass
keeps green the winter through. Here, then, these seven wayfarers
stayed week after week. Whenever I stole up cautiously and peeped over
the bank into their verdant hiding-place, I was sure to hear the
familiar cry; and directly one bird, and then another, and another,
would start up before me, disclosing the characteristic brown feathers
of the lower back. They commonly assembled in the middle of the marsh
upon the snow or ice, where they stood for a little, bobbing their heads
in mutual conference, and then flew off over the house and over the
orchard, calling as they flew.

Throughout December, and indeed throughout the winter, brown creepers
and red-bellied nuthatches were surprisingly abundant. Every pine wood
seemed to have its colony of them. Whether the extraordinary mildness of
the season had anything to do with this I cannot say; but their presence
was welcome, whatever the reason for it. Like the chickadee, with whom
they have the good taste to be fond of associating, they are always busy
and cheerful, appearing not to mind either snow-storm or low
temperature. No reasonable observer would ever tax them with effeminacy,
though the creeper, it must be owned, cannot speak without lisping.

Following my usual practice, I began a catalogue of the month's birds,
and at the end of a fortnight discovered, to my astonishment, that the
name of the downy woodpecker was missing. He had been common during
November, and is well known as one of our familiar winter residents. I
began forthwith to keep a sharp lookout for him, particularly whenever I
went near any apple orchard. A little later, I actually commenced making
excursions on purpose to find him. But the fates were against me, and go
where I would, he was not there. At last I gave him up. Then, on the
27th, as I sat at my desk, a chickadee chirped outside. Of course I
looked out to see him; and there, exploring the branches of an old
apple-tree, directly under my window, was the black-and-white woodpecker
for whom I had been searching in vain through five or six townships. The
saucy fellow! He rapped smartly three or four times; then he
straightened himself back, as woodpeckers do, and said: "Good-morning,
sir! Where have you been so long? If you wish to see _me_, you had
better stay at home." He might have spoken a little less pertly; for
after all, if a man would know what is going on, whether in summer or
winter, he must not keep too much in his own door-yard. Of the thirty
birds in my December list, I should have seen perhaps ten if I had sat
all the time at my window, and possibly twice that number had I confined
my walks within the limits of my own town.

While the migration is going on, to be sure, one may find birds in the
most unexpected places. Last May I glanced up from my book and espied an
olive-backed thrush in the back yard, foraging among the currant-bushes.
Raising a window quietly, I whistled something like an imitation of his
inimitable song; and the little traveler--always an easy dupe--pricked
up his ears, and presently responded with a strain which carried me
straight into the depths of a White Mountain forest. But in December,
with some exceptions, of course, birds must be sought after rather than
waited for. The 15th, for example, was a most uncomfortable day,--so
uncomfortable that I stayed indoors,--the mercury only two or three
degrees above zero, and a strong wind blowing. Such weather would drive
the birds under shelter. The next forenoon, therefore, I betook myself
to a hill covered thickly with pines and cedars. Here I soon ran upon
several robins, feeding upon the savin berries, and in a moment more was
surprised by a _tseep_ so loud and emphatic that I thought at once of a
fox sparrow. Then I looked for a song sparrow,--badly startled,
perhaps,--but found to my delight a white-throat. He was on the ground,
but at my approach flew into a cedar. Here he drew in his head and sat
perfectly still, the picture of discouragement. I could not blame him,
but was glad, an hour later, to find him again on the ground, picking up
his dinner. I leveled my glass at him and whistled his Peabody song (the
simplest of all bird songs to imitate), but he moved not a feather.
Apparently he had never heard it before! He was still there in the
afternoon, and I had hopes of his remaining through the winter; but I
never could find him afterwards. Ten days prior to this I had gone to
Longwood on a special hunt for this same sparrow, remembering a certain
peculiarly cozy hollow where, six or eight years before, a little
company of song sparrows and white-throats had passed a rather severe
winter. The song sparrows were there again, as I had expected, but no
white-throats. The song sparrows, by the way, treated me shabbily this
season. A year ago several of them took up their quarters in a roadside
garden patch, where I could look in upon them almost daily. This year
there were none to be discovered anywhere in this neighborhood. They
figure in my December list on four days only, and were found in four
different towns,--Brookline (Longwood), Marblehead, Nahant, and
Cohasset. Like some others of our land birds (notably the golden-winged
woodpecker and the meadow lark), they seem to have learned that winter
loses a little of its rigor along the sea-board.

Three kinds of land birds were met with at Nahant Beach, and nowhere
else: the Ipswich sparrow,--on the 3d and 26th,--the snow bunting, and
the horned lark. Of the last two species, both of them rather common in
November, I saw but one individual each. They were feeding side by
side, and, after a short separation,--under the fright into which my
sudden appearance put them,--one called to the other, and they flew off
in company towards Lynn. It was a pleasing display of sociability, but
nothing new; for in winter, as every observer knows, birds not of a
feather flock together. The Ipswich sparrow, a very retiring but not
peculiarly timid creature, I have now seen at Nahant in every one of our
seven colder months,--from October to April,--though it is
unquestionably rare upon the Massachusetts coast between the fall and
spring migrations. Besides the species already named, my monthly list
included the following: herring gull, great black-backed gull, ruffed
grouse, hairy woodpecker, flicker, goldfinch, tree sparrow, snowbird,
blue jay, crow, shrike, white-bellied nuthatch (only two or three
birds), golden-crowned kinglet, and one small hawk.[6]

[6] To this list my ornithological comrade before mentioned added seven
species, namely: white-winged scoter, barred owl, cowbird, purple finch,
white-winged crossbill, fox sparrow, and winter wren. Between us, as far
as land birds went, we did pretty well.

The only birds that sang during the month--unless we include the
red-bellied nuthatches, whose frequent quaint twitterings should,
perhaps, come under this head--were the chickadees and a single robin.
The former I have down as uttering their sweet phoebe whistle--which I
take to be certainly their song, as distinguished from all their
multifarious calls--on seven of the thirty-one days. They were more
tuneful in January, and still more so in February; so that the titmouse,
as becomes a creature so full of good humor and high spirits, may fairly
be said to sing all winter long. The robin's music was a pleasure quite
unexpected. I was out on Sunday, the 30th, for a few minutes' stroll
before breakfast, when the obliging stranger (I had not seen a robin for
a fortnight, and did not see another for nearly two months) broke into
song from a hill-top covered with pitch-pines. He was in excellent
voice, and sang again and again. The morning invited music,--warm and
cloudless, like an unusually fine morning in early April.

For an entire week, indeed, the weather had seemed to be trying to outdo
itself. I remember in particular the day before Christmas. I rose long
before daylight, crossed the Mystic River marshes as the dawn was
beginning to break, and shortly after sunrise was on my way down the
South Shore. Leaving the cars at Cohasset, I sauntered over the
Jerusalem Road to Nantasket, spent a little while on the beach, and
brought up at North Cohasset, where I was attracted by a
lonesome-looking road running into the woods all by itself, with a
guide-board marked "Turkey Hill." Why not accept the pleasing
invitation, which seemed meant on purpose for just such an idle
pedestrian as myself? As for Turkey Hill, I had never heard of it, and
presumed it to be some uninteresting outlying hamlet. My concern, as a
saunterer's ought always to be, was with the road itself, not with what
might lie at the end of it. I did not discover my mistake till I had
gone half a mile, more or less, when the road all at once turned sharply
to the right and commenced ascending. Then it dawned upon me that Turkey
Hill must be no other than the long, gradual, grassy <DW72> at which I
had already been looking from the railway station. The prospect of sea
and land was beautiful; all the more so, perhaps, because of a thick
autumnal haze. It might be called excellent Christmas weather, I said to
myself, when a naturally prudent man, no longer young, could sit perched
upon a fence rail at the top of a hill, drinking in the beauties of the
landscape.

At the station, after my descent, I met a young man of the neighborhood.
"Do you know why they call that Turkey Hill?" said I. "No, sir, I
don't," he answered. I suggested that probably somebody had killed a
wild turkey up there at some time or other. He looked politely
incredulous. "I don't _think_ there are any wild turkeys up there," said
he; "_I_ never saw any." He was not more than twenty-five years old, and
the last Massachusetts turkey was killed on Mount Tom in 1847, so that I
had no doubt he spoke the truth. Probably he took me for a simple-minded
fellow, while I thought nothing worse of him than that he was one of
those people, so numerous and at the same time so much to be pitied, who
have never studied ornithology.

The 25th was warmer even than the 24th; and it, likewise, I spent upon
the South Shore, though at a point somewhat farther inland, and in a
town where I was not likely to lose myself, least of all in any
out-of-the-way woodland road. In short, I spent Christmas on my native
heath,--a not inappropriate word, by the bye, for a region so largely
grown up to huckleberry bushes. "Holbrook's meadows," and "Norton
pasture!"--the names are not to be found on any map, and will convey no
meaning to my readers; but in my ears they awaken memories of many and
many a sunny hour. On this holiday I revisited them both. Warm as it
was, boys and girls were skating on the meadows (in spite of their name,
these have been nothing but a pond for as long as I can remember), and I
stood awhile by the old Ross cellar, watching their evolutions. How
bright and cheery it was in the little sheltered clearing, with nothing
in sight but the leafless woods and the ice-covered pond! "Shan't I take
your coat?" the sun seemed to be asking. At my elbow stood a bunch of
lilac bushes ("laylocks" they were probably called by the man who set
them out[7]) that had blossomed freely in the summer. The house has
been gone for these thirty years or more (alas! my sun must be rapidly
declining when memory casts so long a shadow), but the bushes seem
likely to hold their own for at least a century. They might have
prompted a wise man to some wise reflections; but for myself, it must be
acknowledged, I fell instead to thinking how many half days I had
fished--and caught nothing, or next to nothing--along this same
pleasant, willow-bordered shore.

[7] So they were called, too, by that lover of flowers, Walter Savage
Landor, who, as his biographer says, followed a pronunciation
"traditional in many old English families."

In Norton pasture, an hour or two later, I made myself young again by
putting a few checkerberries into my mouth; and in a small new clearing
just over the brook ("Dyer's Run," this used to be called, but I fear
the name is falling into forgetfulness) I stumbled upon a patch of some
handsome evergreen shrub, which I saw at once to be a novelty. I took it
for a member of the heath family, but it proved to belong with the
hollies,--_Ilex glabra_, or ink-berry, a plant not to be found in the
county where it is my present lot to botanize. So, even on my native
heath, I had discovered something new.

The flora of a Massachusetts December is of necessity limited. Even in
the month under review, singularly favorable as it was, I found but
sixteen sorts of wild blossoms; a small number, surely, though perhaps
larger by sixteen than the average reader would have guessed. The names
of these hardy adventurers must by no means go unrecorded: shepherd's
purse, wild pepper-grass, <DW29>, common chickweed (_Stellaria media_),
mouse-ear chickweed (_Cerastium viscosum_), knawel, common mallow,
witch-hazel, cinque-foil (_Potentilla Norvegica_,--not _argentea_, as I
should certainly have expected), many-flowered aster, cone-flower,
yarrow, two kinds of groundsel, fall dandelion, and jointweed. Six of
these--mallow, cinque-foil, aster, cone-flower, fall dandelion, and
jointweed--were noticed only at Nahant; and it is further to be said
that the jointweed was found by a friend, not by myself, while the
cone-flower was not in strictness a blossom; that is to say, its rays
were well opened, making what in common parlance is called a flower, but
the true florets were not yet perfected. Such witch-hazel blossoms as
can be gathered in December are of course nothing but belated specimens.
I remarked a few on the 2d, and again on the 10th; and on the afternoon
of Christmas, happening to look into a hamamelis-tree, I saw what looked
like a flower near the top. The tree was too small for climbing and
almost too large for bending, but I managed to get it down; and sure
enough, the bit of yellow was indeed a perfectly fresh blossom. How did
it know I was to pass that way on Christmas afternoon, and by what sort
of freemasonry did it attract my attention? I loved it and left it on
the stalk, in the true Emersonian spirit, and here I do my little best
to embalm its memory.

One of the groundsels (_Senecio viscosus_) is a recent immigrant from
Europe, but has been thoroughly established in the Back Bay lands of
Boston--where I now found it, in perfect condition, December 4th--for at
least half a dozen years. In Gray's "Flora of North America" it is said
to grow there and in the vicinity of Providence; but since that account
was written it has made its appearance in Lowell, and probably in other
places. It is a coarse-looking little plant, delighting to grow in pure
gravel; but its blossoms are pretty, and now, with not another flower of
any sort near it, it looked, as the homely phrase is, "as handsome as a
picture." Its more generally distributed congener, _Senecio
vulgaris_,--also a foreigner--is, next to the common chickweed, I should
say, our very hardiest bloomer. At the beginning of the month it was in
flower in an old garden in Melrose; and at Marblehead Neck a
considerable patch of it was fairly yellow with blossoms all through
December and January, and I know not how much longer. I saw no
shepherd's purse after December 27th, but knawel was in flower as late
as January 18th. The golden-rods, it will be observed, are absent
altogether from my list; and the same would have been true of the
asters, but for a single plant. This, curiously enough, still bore five
heads of tolerably fresh blossoms, after all its numberless companions,
growing upon the same hillside, had succumbed to the frost.

Of my sixteen plants, exactly one half are species that have been
introduced from Europe; six are members of the composite family; and if
we omit the cone-flower, all but three of the entire number are simple
whites and yellows. Two red flowers, the clover and the pimpernel,
disappointed my search; but the blue hepatica would almost certainly
have been found, had it come in my way to look for it.

Prettier even than the flowers, however, was the December greenness,
especially of the humbler sorts: St. John's-wort, five-finger, the
creeping blackberries,--whose modest winter loveliness was never half
appreciated,--herb-robert, corydalis, partridge-berry, checkerberry,
wintergreen, rattlesnake-plantain, veronica, and linnaea, to say nothing
of the ferns and mosses. Most refreshing of all, perhaps, was an
occasional patch of bright green grass, like the one already spoken of,
at Marblehead, or like one even brighter and prettier, which I visited
more than once in Swampscott.

As I review what I have written, I am tempted to exclaim with
Tennyson:--

    "And was the day of my delight
     As pure and perfect as I say?"

But I answer, in all good conscience, yes. The motto with which I began
states the truth somewhat strongly, perhaps (it must be remembered where
I got it), but aside from that one bit of harmless borrowed hyperbole, I
have delivered a plain, unvarnished tale. For all that, however, I do
not expect my industrious fellow-citizens to fall in at once with my
opinion that winter is a pleasant season at the seashore (it would be
too bad they should, as far as my own enjoyment is concerned), and
December a month propitious for leisurely all-day rambles. How foreign
such notions are to people in general I have lately had several forcible
reminders. On one of my jaunts from Marblehead to Swampscott, for
example, I had finally taken to the railway, and was in the narrow,
tortuous cut through the ledges, when, looking back, I saw a young
gentleman coming along after me. He was in full skating rig, fur cap and
all, with a green bag in one hand and a big hockey stick in the other. I
stopped every few minutes to listen for any bird that might chance to be
in the woods on either hand, and he could not well avoid overtaking me,
though he seemed little desirous of doing so. The spot was lonesome,
and as he went by, and until he was some rods in advance, he kept his
head partly turned. There was no mistaking the significance of that
furtive, sidelong glance; he had read the newspapers, and didn't intend
to be attacked from behind unawares! If he should ever cast his eye over
these pages (and whatever he may have thought of my appearance, I am
bound to say of him that he looked like a man who might appreciate good
literature), he will doubtless remember the incident, especially if I
mention the field-glass which I carried slung over one shoulder.
Evidently the world sees no reason why a man with anything better to do
should be wandering aimlessly about the country in midwinter. Nor do I
quarrel with the world's opinion. The majority is wiser than the
minority, of course; otherwise, what becomes of its divine and
inalienable right to lay down the law? The truth with me was that I
_had_ nothing better to do. I confess it without shame. Surely there is
no lack of shoemakers. Why, then, should not here and there a man take
up the business of walking, of wearing out shoes? Everything is related
to everything else, and the self-same power that brought the killdeers
to Marblehead sent me there to see them and do them honor. Should it
please the gods to order it so, I shall gladly be kept running on such
errands for a score or two of winters.




DYER'S HOLLOW.

                      "Quiet hours
    Pass'd among these heaths of ours
    By the grey Atlantic sea."
                       MATTHEW ARNOLD.


I lived for three weeks at the "Castle," though, unhappily, I did not
become aware of my romantic good fortune till near the close of my stay.
There was no trace of battlement or turret, nothing in the least
suggestive of Warwick or Windsor, or of Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the
Castle was not a building of any kind, but a hamlet; a small collection
of houses--a somewhat scattered collection, it must be owned,--such as,
on the bleaker and sandier parts of Cape Cod, is distinguished by the
name of village. On one side flowed the river, doubling its course
through green meadows with almost imperceptible motion. As I watched the
tide come in, I found myself saying,--

    "Here twice a day the Pamet fills,
       The salt sea-water passes by."

But the rising flood could make no "silence in the hills;" for the
Pamet, as I saw it, is far too sedate a stream ever to be caught
"babbling." It has only some three miles to run, and seems to know
perfectly well that it need not run fast.

My room would have made an ideal study for a lazy man, I thought, the
two windows facing straight into a sand-bank, above which rose a steep
hill, or perhaps I should rather say the steep wall of a plateau, on
whose treeless top, all by themselves, or with only a graveyard for
company, stood the Town Hall and the two village churches. Perched thus
upon the roof of the Cape, as it were, and surmounted by cupola and
belfry, the hall and the "orthodox" church made invaluable beacons,
visible from far and near in every direction. For three weeks I steered
my hungry course by them twice a day, having all the while a pleasing
consciousness that, however I might skip the Sunday sermon, I was by no
means neglecting my religious privileges. The second and smaller
meeting-house belonged to a Methodist society. On its front were the
scars of several small holes which had been stopped and covered with
tin. A resident of the Castle assured me that the mischief had been done
by pigeon woodpeckers,--flickers,--a statement at which I inwardly
rejoiced. Long ago I had announced my belief that these enthusiastic
shouters must be of the Wesleyan persuasion, and here was the proof!
Otherwise, why had they never sought admission to the more imposing and,
as I take it, more fashionable orthodox sanctuary? Yes, the case was
clear. I could understand now how Darwin and men like him must have felt
when some great hypothesis of theirs received sudden confirmation from
an unexpected quarter. At the same time I was pained to see that the
flickers' attempts at church-going had met with such indifferent
encouragement. Probably the minister and the class leaders would have
justified their exclusiveness by an appeal to that saying about those
who enter "not by the door into the sheepfold;" while the woodpeckers,
on their part, might have retorted that just when they had most need to
go in the door was shut.

One of my favorite jaunts was to climb this hill, or plateau, the "Hill
of Storms" (I am still ignorant whether the storms in question were
political, ecclesiastical, or atmospheric, but I approve the name), and
go down on the other side into a narrow valley whose meanderings led me
to the ocean beach. This valley, or, to speak in the local dialect, this
hollow, like the parallel one in which I lived,--the valley of the
Pamet,--runs quite across the Cape, from ocean to bay, a distance of two
miles and a half, more or less.

At my very first sight of Dyer's Hollow I fell in love with it, and now
that I have left it behind me, perhaps forever, I foresee that my
memories of it are likely to be even fairer and brighter than was the
place itself. I call it Dyer's Hollow upon the authority of the town
historian, who told me, if I understood him correctly, that this was its
name among sailors, to whom it is a landmark. By the residents of the
town I commonly heard it spoken of as Longnook or Pike's Hollow, but for
reasons of my own I choose to remember it by its nautical designation,
though myself as far as possible from being a nautical man.

To see Dyer's Hollow at its best, the visitor should enter it at the
western end, and follow its windings till he stands upon the bluff
looking out upon the Atlantic. If his sensations at all resemble mine,
he will feel, long before the last curve is rounded, as if he were
ascending a mountain; and an odd feeling it is, the road being level, or
substantially so, for the whole distance. At the outset he is in a
green, well-watered valley on the banks of what was formerly Little
Harbor. The building of the railway embankment has shut out the tide,
and what used to be an arm of the bay is now a body of fresh water.
Luxuriant cat-tail flags fringe its banks, and cattle are feeding near
by. Up from the reeds a bittern will now and then start. I should like
to be here once in May, to hear the blows of his stake-driver's mallet
echoing and re-echoing among the close hills. At that season, too, all
the uplands would be green. So we were told, at any rate, though the
pleasing story was almost impossible of belief. In August, as soon as we
left the immediate vicinity of Little Harbor, the very bottom of the
valley itself was parched and brown; and the look of barrenness and
drought increased as we advanced, till toward the end, as the last
houses were passed, the total appearance of things became subalpine:
stunted, weather-beaten trees, and broad patches of bearberry showing at
a little distance like beds of mountain cranberry.

All in all, Dyer's Hollow did not impress me as a promising farming
country. Acres and acres of horseweed, pinweed, stone clover, poverty
grass,[8] reindeer moss, mouse-ear everlasting, and bearberry! No wonder
such fields do not pay for fencing-stuff. No wonder, either, that the
dwellers here should be mariculturalists rather than agriculturalists.
And still, although their best garden is the bay, they have their
gardens on land also,--the bottoms of the deepest hollows being selected
for the purpose,--and by hook or by crook manage to coax a kind of
return out of the poverty-stricken soil. Even on Cape Cod there must be
some potatoes to go with the fish. Vegetables raised under such
difficulties are naturally sweet to the taste, and I was not so much
surprised, therefore, on a certain state occasion at the Castle, to see
a mighty dish of string beans ladled into soup-plates and exalted to the
dignity of a separate course. Here, too,--but this was in Dyer's
Hollow,--I found in successful operation one of the latest, and, if I
may venture an unprofessional opinion, one of the most valuable,
improvements in the art of husbandry. An old man, an ancient mariner, no
doubt, was seated on a camp-stool and plying a hoe among his cabbages.
He was bent nearly double with age ("triple" is the word in my notebook,
but that may have been an exaggeration), and had learned wisdom with
years. I regretted afterward that I had not got over the fence and
accosted him. I could hardly have missed hearing something rememberable.
Yet I may have done wisely to keep the road. Industry like his ought
never to be intruded upon lightly. Some, I dare say, would have called
the sight pathetic. To me it was rather inspiring. Only a day or two
before, in another part of the township, I had seen a man sitting in a
chair among his bean-poles picking beans. Those heavy, sandy roads and
steep hills must be hard upon the legs, and probably the dwellers
thereabout (unlike the Lombardy poplars, which there, as elsewhere, were
decaying at the top) begin to die at the lower extremities. It was not
many miles from Dyer's Hollow that Thoreau fell in with the old wrecker,
"a regular Cape Cod man," of whom he says that "he looked as if he
sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort." Quite
otherwise was it with my wise-hearted agricultural economists; and quite
otherwise shall it be with me, also, who mean to profit by their
example. If I am compelled to dig when I get old (to beg may I ever be
ashamed!), I am determined not to forget the camp-stool. The Cape Cod
motto shall be mine,--He that hoeth cabbages, let him do it with
assiduity.

[8] In looking over the town history, I was pleased to come upon a note
in defense of this lowly plant, on the score not only of its beauty, but
of its usefulness in holding the sand in place; but, alas, "all men have
not faith," and where the historian wrote _Hudsonia tomentosa_ the
antipathetic compositor set up _Hudsonia tormentosa_. That compositor
was a Cape Cod man,--I would wager a dinner upon it. "Thus the whirligig
of time brings in his revenges," I hear him mutter, as he slips the
superfluous consonant into its place.

This aged cultivator, not so much "on his last legs" as beyond them, was
evidently a native of the soil, but several of the few houses standing
along the valley road were occupied by Western Islanders. I was crossing
a field belonging to one of them when the owner greeted me; a milkman,
as it turned out, proud of his cows and of his boy, his only child. "How
old do you think he is?" he asked, pointing to the young fellow. It
would have been inexcusable to disappoint his fatherly expectations, and
I guessed accordingly: "Seventeen or eighteen." "Sixteen," he
rejoined,--"sixteen!" and his face shone till I wished I had set the
figure a little higher. The additional years would have cost me nothing,
and there is no telling how much happiness they might have conferred.
"Who lives there?" I inquired, turning to a large and well-kept house in
the direction of the bay. "My nephew." "Did he come over when you did?"
"No, I sent for him." He himself left the Azores as a cabin boy, landed
here on Cape Cod, and settled down. Since then he had been to
California, where he worked in the mines. "Ah! that was where you got
rich, was it?" said I. "Rich!"--this in a tone of sarcasm. But he added,
"Well, I made something." His praise of his nearest neighbor--whose
name proclaimed his Cape Cod nativity--made me think well not only of
his neighbor, but of him. There were forty-two Portuguese families in
Truro, he said. "There are more than that in Provincetown?" I suggested.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, about half the people." And pretty good
people they are, if such as I saw were fair representatives. One boy of
fourteen (unlike the milkman's heir, he was very small for his years, as
he told me with engaging simplicity) walked by my side for a mile or
two, and quite won my heart. A true Nathanael he seemed, in whom was no
guile. He should never go to sea, he said; nor was he ever going to get
married so long as his father lived. He loved his father so much, and he
was the only boy, and his father couldn't spare him. "But didn't your
father go to sea?" "Oh, yes; both my fathers went to sea." That was a
puzzle; but presently it came out that his two fathers were his father
and his grandfather. He looked troubled for a moment when I inquired the
whereabouts of the poorhouse, in the direction of which we happened to
be going. He entertained a very decided opinion that he shouldn't like
to live there; a wholesome aversion, I am bound to maintain, dear Uncle
Venner to the contrary notwithstanding.

A stranger was not an every-day sight in Dyer's Hollow, I imagine, and
as I went up and down the road a good many times in the course of my
visit, I came to be pretty well known. So it happened that a Western
Islands woman came to her front door once, broom in hand and the
sweetest of smiles on her face, and said, "Thank you for that five cents
you gave my little boy the other day." "Put that in your pocket," I had
said, and the obedient little man did as he was bidden, without so much
as a side glance at the denomination of the coin. But he forgot one
thing, and when his mother asked him, as of course she did, for mothers
are all alike, "Did you thank the gentleman?" he could do nothing but
hang his head. Hence the woman's smile and "thank you," which made me so
ashamed of the paltriness of the gift (Thackeray never saw a boy without
wanting to give him a _sovereign_!) that my mention of the matter here,
so far from indicating an ostentatious spirit, ought rather to be taken
as a mark of humility.

All things considered, I should hardly choose to settle for life in
Dyer's Hollow; but with every recollection of the place I somehow feel
as if its score or two of inhabitants were favored above other men. Why
is it that people living thus by themselves, and known thus transiently
and from the outside as it were, always seem in memory like dwellers in
some land of romance? I cannot tell, but so it is; and whoever has such
a picture on the wall of his mind will do well, perhaps, never to put
the original beside it. Yet I do not mean to speak quite thus of Dyer's
Hollow. Once more, at least, I hope to walk the length of that
straggling road. As I think of it now, I behold again those beds of
shining bearberry ("resplendent" would be none too fine a word; there is
no plant for which the sunlight does more), loaded with a wealth of
handsome red fruit. The beach-plum crop was a failure; plum wine, of the
goodness of which I heard enthusiastic reports, would be scarce; but one
needed only to look at the bearberry patches to perceive that Cape Cod
sand was not wanting in fertility after a manner of its own. If its
energies in the present instance happened to be devoted to ornament
rather than utility, it was not for an untaxed and disinterested
outsider to make complaint; least of all a man who was never a
wine-bibber, and who believes, or thinks he believes, in "art for art's
sake." Within the woods the ground was carpeted with trailing arbutus
and a profusion of checkerberry vines, the latter yielding a few fat
berries, almost or quite a year old, but still sound and spicy, still
tasting "like tooth-powder," as the benighted city boy expressed it. It
was an especial pleasure to eat them here in Dyer's Hollow, I had so
many times done the same in another place, on the banks of Dyer's Run.
Lady's-slippers likewise (nothing but leaves) looked homelike and
friendly, and the wild lily of the valley, too, and the pipsissewa.
Across the road from the old house nearest the ocean stood a still more
ancient-seeming barn, long disused, to all appearance, but with old
maid's pinks, catnip, and tall, stout pokeberry weeds yet flourishing
beside it. Old maid's pinks and catnip! Could that combination have been
fortuitous?

No botanist, nor even a semi-scientific lover of growing things, like
myself, can ever walk in new fields without an eye for new plants. While
coming down the Cape in the train I had seen, at short intervals,
clusters of some strange flower,--like yellow asters, I thought. At
every station I jumped off the car and looked hurriedly for specimens,
till, after three or four attempts, I found what I was seeking,--the
golden aster, _Chrysopsis falcata_. Here in Truro it was growing
everywhere, and of course in Dyer's Hollow. Another novelty was the pale
greenbrier, _Smilax glauca_, which I saw first on the hill at
Provincetown, and afterward discovered in Longnook. It was not abundant
in either place, and in my eyes had less of beauty than its familiar
relatives, the common greenbrier (cat-brier, horse-brier, Indian-brier)
of my boyhood, and the carrion flower. This glaucous smilax was one of
the plants that attracted Thoreau's attention, if I remember right,
though I cannot now put my finger upon his reference to it. Equally new
to me, and much more beautiful, as well as more characteristic of the
place, were the broom-crowberry and the greener kind of poverty grass
(_Hudsonia ericoides_), inviting pillows or cushions of which, looking
very much alike at a little distance, were scattered freely over the
grayish hills. These huddling, low-lying plants were among the things
which bestowed upon Longnook its pleasing and remarkable mountain-top
aspect. The rest of the vegetation was more or less familiar, I believe:
the obtuse-leaved milkweed, of which I had never seen so much before;
three sorts of goldenrod, including abundance of the fragrant _odora_;
two kinds of yellow gerardia, and, in the lower lands at the western end
of the valley, the dainty rose gerardia, just now coming into bloom; the
pretty _Polygala polygama_,--pretty, but not in the same class with the
rose gerardia; ladies' tresses; bayberry; sweet fern; crisp-leaved
tansy; beach grass; huckleberry bushes, for whose liberality I had
frequent occasion to be thankful; bear oak; chinquapin; chokeberry; a
single vine of the Virginia creeper; wild carrot; wild cherry; the
common brake,--these and doubtless many more were there, for I made no
attempt at a full catalogue. There must have been wild roses along the
roadside and on the edge of the thickets, I should think, yet I cannot
recollect them, nor does the name appear in my penciled memoranda. Had
the month been June instead of August, notebook and memory would record
a very different story, I can hardly doubt; but out of flower is out of
mind.

In the course of my many visits to Dyer's Hollow I saw thirty-three
kinds of birds, of the eighty-four species in my full Truro list. The
number of individuals was small, however, and, except at its lower end,
the valley was, or appeared to be, nearly destitute of feathered life. A
few song sparrows, a cat-bird or two, a chewink or two, a field sparrow,
and perhaps a Maryland yellow-throat might be seen above the last
houses, but as a general thing the bushes and trees were deserted.
Walking here, I could for the time almost forget that I had ever owned a
hobby-horse. But farther down the hollow there was one really "birdy"
spot, to borrow a word--useful enough to claim lexicographical
standing--from one of my companions: a tiny grove of stunted oaks, by
the roadside, just at the point where I naturally struck the valley
when I approached it by way of the Hill of Storms. Here I happened upon
my only Cape Cod cowbird, a full-grown youngster, who was being
ministered unto in the most devoted manner by a red-eyed vireo,--such a
sight as always fills me with mingled amusement, astonishment,
admiration, and disgust. That any bird should be so befooled and imposed
upon! Here, too, I saw at different times an adult male blue
yellow-backed warbler, and a bird of the same species in immature
plumage. It seemed highly probable, to say the least, that the young
fellow had been reared not far off, the more so as the neighboring
Wellfleet woods were spectral with hanging lichens, of the sort which
this exquisite especially affects. At first I wondered why this
particular little grove, by no means peculiarly inviting in appearance,
should be the favorite resort of so many birds,--robins, orioles, wood
pewees, kingbirds, chippers, golden warblers, black-and-white creepers,
prairie warblers, red-eyed vireos, and blue yellow-backs; but I
presently concluded that a fine spring of water just across the road
must be the attraction. Near the spring was a vegetable garden, and
here, on the 22d of August, I suddenly espied a water thrush teetering
upon the tip of a bean-pole, his rich olive-brown back glistening in the
sunlight. He soon dropped to the ground among the vines, and before long
walked out into sight. His action when he saw me was amusing. Instead of
darting back, as a sparrow, for instance, would have done, he flew up to
the nearest perch; that is, to the top of the nearest bean-pole, which
happened to be a lath. Wood is one of the precious metals on Cape Cod,
and if oars are used for fence-rails, and fish-nets for hen-coops, why
not laths for bean-poles? The perch was narrow, but wide enough for the
bird's small feet. Four times he came up in this way to look about him,
and every time alighted thus on the top of a pole. At the same moment
three prairie warblers were chasing each other about the garden, now
clinging to the side of the poles, now alighting on their tips. It was a
strange spot for prairie warblers, as it seemed to me, though they
looked still more out of place a minute later, when they left the
bean-patch and sat upon a rail fence in an open grassy field. Cape Cod
birds, like Cape Cod men, know how to shift their course with the wind.
Where else would one be likely to see prairie warblers, black-throated
greens, and black-and-white creepers scrambling in company over the red
shingles of a house-roof, and song sparrows singing day after day from a
chimney-top?

In all my wanderings in Dyer's Hollow, only once did I see anything of
that pest of the seashore, the sportsman; then, in the distance, two
young fellows, with a highly satisfactory want of success, as well as I
could make out, were trying to take the life of a meadow lark. No doubt
they found existence a dull affair, and felt the need of something to
enliven it. A noble creature is man,--"a little lower than the angels!"
Two years in succession I have been at the seashore during the autumnal
migration of sandpipers and plovers. Two years in succession have I seen
men, old and young, murdering sandpipers and plovers at wholesale for
the mere fun of doing it. Had they been "pot hunters," seeking to earn
bread by shooting for the market, I should have pitied them,
perhaps,--certainly I should have regretted their work; but I should
have thought no ill of them. Their vocation would have been as
honorable, for aught I know, as that of any other butcher. But a man of
twenty, a man of seventy, shooting sanderlings, ring plovers, golden
plovers, and whatever else comes in his way, not for money, nor
primarily for food, but because he enjoys the work! "A little lower than
the angels!" What numbers of innocent and beautiful creatures have I
seen limping painfully along the beach, after the gunners had finished
their day's amusement! Even now I think with pity of one particular
turnstone. Some being made "a little lower than the angels" had fired at
him and carried away one of his legs. I watched him for an hour. Much of
the time he stood motionless. Then he hobbled from one patch of
eel-grass to another, in search of something to eat. My heart ached for
him, and it burns now to think that good men find it a pastime to break
birds' legs and wings and leave them to perish. I have seen an old man,
almost ready for the grave, who could amuse his last days in this way
for weeks together. An exhilarating and edifying spectacle it
was,--this venerable worthy sitting behind his bunch of wooden decoys, a
wounded tern fluttering in agony at his feet. Withal, be it said, he was
a man of gentlemanly bearing, courteous, and a Christian. He did not
shoot on Sunday,--not he. Such sport is to me despicable. Yet it is
affirmed by those who ought to know--by those, that is, who engage in
it--that it tends to promote a spirit of manliness.

But thoughts of this kind belong not in Dyer's Hollow. Rather let me
remember only its stillness and tranquillity, its innocent inhabitants,
its gray hills, its sandy road, and the ocean at the end of the way.
Even at the western extremity, near the railway and the busy harbor, the
valley was the very abode of quietness. Here, on one of my earlier
excursions, I came unexpectedly to a bridge, and on the farther side of
the bridge to a tidy house and garden; and in the garden were several
pear-trees, with fruit on them! Still more to my surprise, here was a
little shop. The keeper of it had also the agency of some insurance
company,--so a signboard informed the passer-by. As for his stock in
trade,--sole leather, dry goods, etc.,--that spoke for itself. I stepped
inside the door, but he was occupied with an account book, and when at
last he looked up there was no speculation in his eyes. Possibly he had
sold something the day before, and knew that no second customer could be
expected so soon. We exchanged the time of day,--not a very valuable
commodity hereabout,--and I asked him a question or two touching the
hollow, and especially "the village," of which I had heard a rumor that
it lay somewhere in this neighborhood. He looked bewildered at the
word,--he hardly knew what I could mean, he said; but with a little
prompting he recollected that a few houses between this point and North
Truro (there used to be more houses than now, but they had been removed
to other towns,--some of them to Boston!) were formerly called "the
village." I left him to his ledger, and on passing his house I saw that
he was a dealer in grain as well as in sole leather and calico, and had
telephonic communication with somebody; an enterprising merchant, after
all, up with the times, in spite of appearances.

The shop was like the valley, a careless tourist might have said,--a
sleepy shop in Sleepy Hollow. To me it seemed not so. Peaceful, remote,
sequestered,--these and all similar epithets suited well with Longnook;
but for myself, in all my loitering there I was never otherwise than
wide awake. The close-lying, barren, mountainous-looking hills did not
oppress the mind, but rather lifted and dilated it, and although I could
not hear the surf, I felt all the while the neighborhood of the sea; not
the harbor, but the ocean, with nothing between me and Spain except that
stretch of water. Blessed forever be Dyer's Hollow, I say, and blessed
be its inhabitants! Whether Western Islanders or "regular Cape Cod men,"
may they live and die in peace.




FIVE DAYS ON MOUNT MANSFIELD.

    "Lead him through the lovely mountain-paths,
     And talk to him of things at hand and common."
                                MATTHEW ARNOLD.


I went up the mountain from the village of Stowe in very ignoble
fashion,--in a wagon,--and was three hours on the passage. One of the
"hands" at the Summit House occupied the front seat with the driver, and
we were hardly out of the village before a seasonable toothache put him
in mind of his pipe. Would smoking be offensive to me? he inquired. What
could I say, having had an aching tooth before now myself? It was a
pleasure almost beyond the luxury of breathing mountain air to see the
misery of a fellow-mortal so quickly assuaged. The driver, a sturdy
young Vermonter, was a man of different spirit. He had never used
tobacco nor drunk a glass of "liquor," I heard him saying. Somebody had
once offered him fifty cents to smoke a cigar.

"Why didn't you take it?" asked his companion in a tone of wonder.

"Well, I'm not that kind of a fellow, to be bought for fifty cents."

As we approached the base of the mountain, a white-throated sparrow was
piping by the roadside.

"I love to hear that bird sing," said the driver.

It was now my turn to be surprised. Our man of principle was also a man
of sentiment.

"What do you call him?" I inquired, as soon as I could recover myself.

"Whistling Jack," he answered; a new name to me, and a good one; it
would take a nicer ear than mine to discriminate with certainty between
a white-throat's voice and a school-boy's whistle.

The morning had promised well, but before we emerged from the forest as
we neared the summit we drove into a cloud, and, shortly afterward, into
a pouring rain. In the office of the hotel I found a company of eight
persons, four men and four women, drying themselves about the stove.
They had left a village twenty miles away at two o'clock that morning
in an open wagon for an excursion to the summit. Like myself, they had
driven into a cloud, and up to this time had seen nothing more distant
than the stable just across the road, within a stone's toss of the
window, and even that only by glimpses. One of the party was a doctor,
who must be at home that night. Hour after hour they watched the clouds,
or rather the rain (we were so beclouded that the clouds could not be
seen), and debated the situation. Finally, at three o'clock, they got
into their open wagon, the rain pelting them fiercely, and started for
the base. Doubtless they soon descended into clear weather, but not till
they were well drenched. Verily the clouds are no respecters of persons.
It is nothing to them how far you have come, nor how worthy your errand.
So I reflected, having nothing better to do, when my wagonful of
pilgrims had dropped out of sight in the fog--as a pebble drops into the
lake--leaving me with the house to myself; and presently, as I sat at
the window, I heard a white-throated sparrow singing outside. Here was
one, at least, whom the rain could not discourage. A wild and yet a
sweet and home-felt strain is this of "Whistling Jack,"--a mountain
bird, well used to mountain weather, and just now too happy to forego
his music, no matter how the storm might rage. I myself had been in a
cloud often enough to feel no great degree of discomfort or lowness of
spirits. I had not decided to spend the precious hours of a brief
vacation upon a mountain-top without taking into account the additional
risk of unfavorable weather in such a place. Let the clouds do their
worst; I could be patient and wait for the sun. But this whistling
philosopher outside spoke of something better than patience, and I
thanked him for the timely word.

Toward noon of the next day the rain ceased, the cloud vanished, and I
made haste to clamber up the rocky peak--the Nose, so called--at the
base of which the hotel is situated. Yes, there stretched Lake
Champlain, visible for almost its entire length, and beyond it loomed
the Adirondacks. I was glad I had come. _I_ could sing now. It does a
man good to look afar off.

Even before the fog lifted I had discovered, to my no small
gratification, that the evergreens immediately about the house were
full of gray-cheeked thrushes, a close colony, strictly confined to the
low trees at the top of the mountain. They were calling at all hours,
_yeep, yeep_, somewhat in the manner of young chickens; and after
supper, as it grew dark, I stood on the piazza while they sang in full
chorus. At least six of them were in tune at once. _Wee-o, wee-o, tit-ti
wee-o_, something like this the music ran, with many variations; a most
ethereal sound, at the very top of the scale, but faint and sweet; quite
in tune also with my mood, for I had just come in from gazing long at
the sunset, with Lake Champlain like a sea of gold for perhaps a hundred
miles, and a stretch of the St. Lawrence showing far away in the north.
During the afternoon, too, I had been over the long crest of the
mountain to the northern peak, the highest point, belittled in local
phraseology as the Chin; a delightful jaunt of two miles, with
magnificent prospects all the way. It was like walking on the ridge-pole
of Vermont, a truly exhilarating experience.

All in all, though the forenoon had been so rainy, I had lived a long
day, and now, if ever, could appreciate the singing of this
characteristic northern songster, himself such a lover of mountains as
never to be heard, here in New England, at least, and in summer-time,
except amid the dwindling spruce forests of the upper <DW72>s. I have
never before seen him so familiar. On the Mount Washington range and on
Mount Lafayette it is easy enough to hear his music, but one rarely gets
more than a flying glimpse of the bird. Here, as I say, he was never out
of hearing, and seldom long out of sight, even from the door-step. The
young were already leaving the nest, and undoubtedly the birds had
disposed themselves for the season before the unpainted,
inoffensive-looking little hotel showed any signs of occupancy. The very
next year a friend of mine visited the place and could discover no trace
of them. They had found their human neighbors a vexation, perhaps, and
on returning from their winter's sojourn in Costa Rica, or where not,
had sought summer quarters on some less trodden peak.

Not so was it with the myrtle warblers, I venture to assert, though on
this point I have never taken my friend's testimony. Perfectly at home
as they are in the wildest and most desolate places, they manifest a
particular fondness for the immediate vicinity of houses, delighting
especially to fly about the gutters of the roof and against the window
panes. Here, at the Summit House, they were constantly to be seen
hawking back and forth against the side of the building, as barn
swallows are given to doing in the streets of cities. The rude structure
was doubly serviceable,--to me a shelter, and to the birds a fly-trap. I
have never observed any other warbler thus making free with human
habitations.

This yellow-rump, or myrtle bird, is one of the thrifty members of his
great family, and next to the black-poll is the most numerous
representative of his tribe in Massachusetts during the spring and fall
migrations; a beautiful little creature, with a characteristic flight
and call, and for a song a pretty trill suggestive of the snow-bird's.
Within two or three years he has been added to the summer fauna of
Massachusetts, and as a son of the Bay State I rejoice in his presence
and heartily bid him welcome. We shall never have too many of such
citizens. I esteem him, also, as the only one of his delicate,
insectivorous race who has the hardihood to spend the winter--sparingly,
but with something like regularity--within the limits of New England. He
has a genius for adapting himself to circumstances; picking up his daily
food in the depths of a mountain forest or off the panes of a
dwelling-house, and wintering, as may suit his fancy or convenience, in
the West Indies or along the sea-coast of Massachusetts.

One advantage of a sojourn at the summit of any of our wooded New
England mountains is the easy access thus afforded to the upper forest.
While I was here upon Mount Mansfield I spent some happy hours almost
every day in sauntering down the road for a mile or two, looking and
listening. Just after leaving the house it was possible to hear three
kinds of thrushes singing at once,--gray-cheeks, olive-backs, and
hermits. Of the three the hermit is beyond comparison the finest singer,
both as to voice and tune. His song, given always in three detached
measures, each higher than the one before it, is distinguished by an
exquisite liquidity, the presence of _d_ and _l_, I should say, as
contrasted with the inferior _t_ sound of the gray-cheek. If it has
less variety, and perhaps less rapture, than the song of the
wood-thrush, it is marked by greater simplicity and ease; and if it does
not breathe the ineffable tranquillity of the veery's strain, it comes
to my ear, at least, with a still nobler message. The hermit's note is
aspiration rather than repose. "Peace, peace!" says the veery, but the
hermit's word is, "Higher, higher!" "Spiritual songs," I call them both,
with no thought of profaning the apostolic phrase.

I had been listening to thrush music (I think I could listen to it
forever), and at a bend of the road had turned to admire the wooded side
of the mountain, just here spread out before me, miles and miles of
magnificent hanging forest, when I was attracted by a noise as of
something gnawing--a borer under the bark of a fallen spruce lying at my
feet. Such an industrious and contented sound! No doubt the grub would
have said, "Yes, I could do _this_ forever." What knew he of the
beauties of the picture at which I was gazing? The very light with which
to see it would have been a torture to him. Heaven itself was under the
close bark of that decaying log. So peradventure, may we ourselves be
living in darkness without knowing it, while spiritual intelligences
look on with wondering pity to see us so in love with our prison-house.
Well, yonder panorama was beautiful to _me_, at all events, however it
might look to more exalted beings, and, like my brother under the
spruce-tree bark, I would make the best of life as I found it.

This way my thoughts were running when all at once two birds dashed by
me--a black-poll warbler in hot pursuit of an olive-backed thrush. The
thrush alighted in a tree and commenced singing, and the warbler sat by
and waited, following the universal rule that a larger bird is never to
be attacked except when on the wing. The thrush repeated his strain once
or twice, and then flew to another tree, the little fellow after him
with all speed. Again the olive-back perched and sang, and again the
black-poll waited. Three times these manoeuvres were repeated, before
the birds passed out of my range. Some wrong-doing, real or fancied, on
the part of the larger bird, had excited the ire of the warbler. Why
should he be imposed upon, simply because he was small? The thrush,
meantime, disdaining to defend himself, would only stop now and then to
sing, as if to show to the world (every creature is the centre of a
world) that such an insect persecution could never ruffle his spirit.
Birds are to be commiserated, perhaps, on having such an excess of what
we call human nature; but the misfortune certainly renders them the more
interesting to us, who see our more amiable weaknesses so often
reflected in their behavior.

For the sympathetic observer every kind of bird has its own temperament.
On one of my jaunts down this Mount Mansfield road I happened to espy a
Canada jay in a thick spruce. He was on one of the lower branches, but
pretty soon began mounting the tree, keeping near the bole and going up
limb by limb in absolute silence, exactly in the manner of our common
blue jay. I was glad to see him, but more desirous to hear his voice,
the loud, harsh scream with which the books credit him, and which, _a
priori_, I should have little hesitation in ascribing to any member of
his tribe. I waited till I grew impatient. Then I started hastily
toward him, making as much commotion as possible in pushing through the
undergrowth. It was a clever scheme, but the bird was not to be
surprised into uttering so much as an exclamation. He dropped out of his
tree, flew a little distance to a lower and less conspicuous perch, and
there I finally left him. Once before, on Mount Clinton, I had seen him,
and had been treated with the same studied silence. And later, I fell in
with a little family party on the side of Mount Washington, and they,
too, refused me so much as a note. Probably I was too near the birds in
every case, though in the third instance there was no attempt at
skulking, nor any symptom of nervousness. I have often been impressed
and amused by the blue jay's habit in this respect. No bird could well
be noisier than he when the noisy mood takes him; but come upon him
suddenly at close quarters, and he will be as still as the grave itself.
He has a double gift, of eloquence and silence,--silver and gold--and no
doubt his Canadian cousin is equally well endowed.

The reader may complain, perhaps, that I speak only of trifles. Why go
to a mountain-top to look at warblers and thrushes? I am not careful to
justify myself. I love a mountain-top, and go there because I love to be
there. It is good, I think, to be lifted above the every-day level, and
to enjoy the society--and the absence of society--which the heights
afford. Looking over my notes of this excursion, I come upon the
following sentence: "To sit on a stone beside a mountain road, with
olive-backed thrushes piping on every side, the ear catching now and
then the distant tinkle of a winter wren's tune, or the nearer _zee,
zee, zee_ of black-poll warblers, while white-throated sparrows call
cheerily out of the spruce forest--this is to be in another world."

This sense of distance and strangeness is not to be obtained, in my case
at all events, by a few hours' stay in such a spot. I must pitch my tent
there, for at least a night or two. I cannot even see the prospect at
first, much less feel the spirit of the place. There must be time for
the old life to drop off, as it were, while eye and ear grow wonted to
novel sights and sounds. Doubtless I did take note of trivial
things,--the call of a bird and the fragrance of a flower. It was a
pleasing relief after living so long with men whose minds were all the
time full of those serious and absorbing questions, "What shall we eat,
and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?"

I remember with special pleasure a profusion of white orchids
(_Habenaria dilatata_) which bordered the roadside not far from the top,
their spikes of waxy snow-white flowers giving out a rich, spicy odor
hardly to be distinguished from the scent of carnation pinks. I
remember, too, how the whole summit, from the Nose to the Chin, was
sprinkled with the modest and beautiful Greenland sandwort, springing up
in every little patch of thin soil, where nothing else would flourish,
and blossoming even under the door-step of the hotel. Unpretending as it
is, this little alpine adventurer makes the most of its beauty. The
blossoms are not crowded into close heads, so as to lose their
individual attractiveness, like the florets of the golden-rod, for
example; nor are they set in a stiff spike, after the manner of the
orchid just now mentioned. At the same time the plant does not trust to
the single flower to bring it into notice. It grows in a pretty tuft,
and throws out its blossoms in a graceful, loose cluster. The eye is
caught by the cluster, and yet each flower shows by itself, and its own
proper loveliness is in no way sacrificed to the general effect. How
wise, too, is the sandwort in its choice of a dwelling-place! In the
valley it would be lost amid the crowd. On the bare, brown mountain-top
its scattered tufts of green and white appeal to all comers.

To what extent, if at all, the sandwort depends upon the service of
insects for its fertilization, I do not know, but it certainly has no
scarcity of such visitors. "Bees will soar for bloom high as the highest
peak of Mansfield;" so runs an entry in my notebook, with a pardonable
adaptation of Wordsworth's line; and I was glad to notice that even the
splendid black-and-yellow butterfly (_Turnus_), which was often to be
seen sucking honey from the fragrant orchids, did not disdain to sip
also from the sandwort's cup. This large and elegant butterfly--our
largest--is thoroughly at home on our New England mountains, sailing
over the very loftiest peaks, and making its way through the forests
with a strong and steady flight. Many a time have I taken a second look
at one, as it has threaded the treetops over my head, thinking to see a
bird. Besides the _Turnus_, I noted here the nettle tortoise-shell
butterfly (_Vanessa Milberti_--a showy insect, and the more attractive
to me as being comparatively a stranger); the common cabbage butterfly;
the yellow _Philodice_; the copper; and, much more abundant than any of
these, a large orange-red fritillary (_Aphrodite_, I suppose),
gorgeously bedecked with spots of silver on the under surface of the
wings. All these evidently knew that plenty of flowers were to be found
along this seemingly barren, rocky crest. Whether they have any less
sensuous motive for loving to wander over such heights, who will presume
to determine? It may very well be that their almost ethereal
structure--such spread of wing with such lightness of body--is only the
outward sign of gracious thoughts and feelings, of a sensitiveness to
beauty far surpassing anything of which we ourselves are capable. What a
contrast between them and the grub gnawing ceaselessly under the
spruce-tree bark! Can the highest angel be as far above the lowest man?
And yet (how mysteriously suggestive would the fact be, if only it were
new to us!) this same light-winged Aphrodite, flitting from blossom to
blossom in the mountain breeze, was but a few days ago an ugly, crawling
thing, close cousin to the borer. Since then it has fallen asleep and
been changed,--a parable, past all doubt, though as yet we lack eyes to
read it.

I have spoken hitherto as if I were the only sojourner at the summit,
but there was another man, though I seldom saw him; a kind of hermit,
living in a little shanty under the lee of the Nose. Almost as a matter
of course he was reputed to be of good family and to read Greek, and the
fact that he now and then received a bank draft evidently gave him a
respectable standing in the eye of the hotel clerk. Something--something
of a very romantic nature, we may be sure--had driven him away from the
companionship of his fellows, but he still found it convenient to be
within reach of human society. Like all such solitaries, he had some
half-insane notions. He could not sleep indoors, not for a night; it
would ruin his health, if I understood him correctly; and because of
wild animals--bears and what not--he made his bed on the roof of his
hermitage. I had often dreamed of the enjoyment of a life in the woods
all by one's self, but such a mode of existence did not gain in
attractiveness as I saw it here in the concrete example. On the whole I
was well satisfied to sleep in the hotel and eat at the hotel table.
Liberty is good, but I thought it might be undesirable to be a slave to
my own freedom.

Two or three times a wagon-load of tourists appeared at the hotel. They
strolled about the summit, admired the prospect, picked a bunch of
sandwort, perhaps, but especially they went to see the snow. They had
been at much trouble to stand upon the highest land in Vermont, and now
that they were here, they wished to do or see something unique,
something that should mark the day as eventful. So they were piloted to
a cave midway between the Nose and the Chin, into which the sun never
peeped, and wherein a snow-bank still lingered. The mountain was grand,
the landscape was magnificent, but to eat a handful of snow and throw a
snow-ball in the middle of July--this was almost like being at the North
Pole; it would be something to talk about after getting home.

One visitor I rejoiced to see, though a stranger. I was on the Nose in
the afternoon, enjoying once more the view of Lake Champlain and the
Adirondacks, when I descried two men far off toward the Chin. They had
come up the mountain, not by the carriage road, but by a trail on the
opposite side, and plainly were in no haste, though the afternoon was
wearing away. As I watched their movements, a mile or two in the
distance, I said to myself, "Good! they are botanists." So it proved; or
rather one of them was a botanist,--a college professor on a pedestrian
collecting-excursion. We compared notes after supper and walked together
the next morning, enjoying that peculiar good fellowship which nothing
but a kindred interest and an unexpected meeting in a lonesome place can
make possible. Then he started down the carriage road with the design of
exploring Smugglers' Notch, and I have never seen or heard from him
since. I hope he is still botanizing on the shores of time, and finding
many a precious rarity; and should he ever read this reference to
himself, may it be with a feeling as kindly as that with which the lines
are written.

That afternoon I followed him, somewhat unexpectedly. I went down, as I
had come up, on wheels; but I will not say in ignoble fashion, for the
driver--the hotel proprietor himself--was in haste, the carriage had no
brake, and the speed with which we rattled down the steep pitches and
round the sharp curves, with the certainty that if anything should
break, the horse would run and our days would be ended,--these things,
and especially the latter consideration, of which I thought and the
other man spoke, made the descent one of pleasurable excitement. We
reached the base in safety and I was left at the nearest farmhouse,
where by dint of some persuasion the housewife was induced to give me a
lodging for the night, so that on the morrow I might make a long day in
Smugglers' Notch, a famous botanical resort between Mount Mansfield and
Mount Sterling, which I had for years been desirous of visiting.

I would gladly have stayed longer on the heights, but it was pleasant
also to be once more in the lowlands; to walk out after supper and look
up instead of down, while the chimney swifts darted hither and thither
with their merry, breathless cacklings. How welcome, too, were the
hearty music of the robin and the carol of the grass finch! After all, I
thought, home is in the valley; but the whistle of the white-throat
reminded me that I was not yet back in Massachusetts.




A WIDOW AND TWINS.

    "The fatherless and the widow ... shall eat and be
        satisfied."--DEUTERONOMY xiv. 29.


On the 1st of June, 1890, I formally broke away from ornithological
pursuits. For two months, more or less,--till the autumnal migration
should set in,--I was determined to have my thoughts upon other matters.
There is no more desirable plaything than an outdoor hobby, but a man
ought not to be forever in the saddle. Such, at all events, had always
been my opinion, so that I long ago promised myself never to become,
what some of my acquaintances, perhaps with too much reason, were now
beginning to consider me, a naturalist, and nothing else. That would be
letting the hobby-horse run away with its owner. For the time being,
then, birds should pass unnoticed, or be looked at only when they came
in my way. A sensible resolve. But the maker of it was neither Mede nor
Persian, as the reader, if he have patience enough, may presently
discover for himself.

As I sat upon the piazza, in the heat of the day, busy or half busy with
a book, a sound of humming-bird's wings now and then fell on my ear,
and, as I looked toward the honeysuckle vine, I began after a while to
remark that the visitor was invariably a female. I watched her probe the
scarlet tubes and dart away, and then returned to my page. She might
have a nest somewhere near; but if she had there was small likelihood of
my finding it, and, besides, I was just now not concerned with such
trifles. On the 24th of June, however, a passing neighbor dropped into
the yard. Was I interested in humming-birds? he inquired. If so, he
could show me a nest. I put down my book, and went with him at once.

The beautiful structure, a model of artistic workmanship, was near the
end of one of the lower branches of an apple-tree, eight or ten feet
from the ground, saddled upon the drooping limb at a point where two
offshoots made a good holding-place, while an upright twig spread over
it a leafy canopy against rain and sun. Had the builders sought my
advice as to a location, I could hardly have suggested one better suited
to my own convenience. The tree was within a stone's toss of my window,
and, better still, the nest was overlooked to excellent advantage from
an old bank wall which divided my premises from those of my next-door
neighbor. How could I doubt that Providence itself had set me a summer
lesson?

At our first visit the discoverer of the nest--from that moment an
ornithologist--brought out a step-ladder, and we looked in upon the two
tiny white eggs, considerately improving a temporary absence of the
owner for that purpose. It was a picture to please not only the eye, but
the imagination; and before I could withdraw my gaze the mother bird was
back again, whisking about my head so fearlessly that for a moment I
stood still, half expecting her to drop into the nest within reach of my
hand.

This, as I have said, was on the 24th of June. Six days later, on the
afternoon of the 30th, the eggs were found to be hatched, and two
lifeless-looking things lay in the bottom of the nest, their heads
tucked out of sight, and their bodies almost or quite naked, except for
a line of grayish down along the middle of the back.

Meanwhile, I had been returning with interest the visits of the bird to
our honeysuckle, and by this time had fairly worn a path to a certain
point in the wall, where, comfortably seated in the shade of the
hummer's own tree, and armed with opera-glass and notebook, I spent some
hours daily in playing the spy upon her motherly doings.

For a widow with a house and family upon her hands, she took life
easily; at frequent intervals she absented herself altogether, and even
when at home she spent no small share of the time in flitting about
among the branches of the tree. On such occasions, I often saw her hover
against the bole or a patch of leaves, or before a piece of caterpillar
or spider web, making quick thrusts with her bill, evidently after bits
of something to eat. On quitting the nest, she commonly perched upon one
or another of a certain set of dead twigs in different parts of the
tree, and at once shook out her feathers and spread her tail, displaying
its handsome white markings, indicative of her sex. This was the
beginning of a leisurely toilet operation, in the course of which she
scratched herself with her feet and dressed her feathers with her bill,
all the while darting out her long tongue with lightning-like rapidity,
as if to moisten her beak, which at other times she cleansed by rubbing
it down with her claws or by wiping it upon a twig. In general she paid
little attention to me, though she sometimes hovered directly in front
of my face, as if trying to stare me out of countenance. One of the most
pleasing features of the show was her method of flying into the nest.
She approached it, without exception, from the same quarter, and, after
an almost imperceptible hovering motion, shut her wings and dropped upon
the eggs.

When the young were hatched I redoubled my attentions. Now I should see
her feed them. On the first afternoon I waited a long time for this
purpose, the mother conducting herself in her customary manner: now
here, now there, preening her plumage, driving away a meddlesome
sparrow, probing the florets of a convenient clover-head (an unusual
resource, I think), or snatching a morsel from some leaf or twig.
Suddenly she flew at me, and held herself at a distance of perhaps four
feet from my nose. Then she wheeled, and, as I thought, darted out of
the orchard. In a few seconds I turned my head, and there she sat in the
nest! I owned myself beaten. While I had been gazing toward the meadow,
she had probably done exactly what I had wasted the better part of the
afternoon in attempting to see.

Twenty-four hours later I was more successful, though the same ruse was
again tried upon me. The mother left the nest at my approach, but in
three minutes (by the watch) flew in again. She brooded for nine
minutes. Then, quite of her own motion, she disappeared for six minutes.
On her return she spent four minutes in dressing her feathers, after
which she alighted on the edge of the nest, fed the little ones, and
took her place upon them. This time she brooded for ten minutes. Then
she was away for six minutes, dallied about the tree for two minutes
longer, and again flew into the nest. While sitting, she pecked several
times in quick succession at a twig within reach, and I could plainly
see her mandibles in motion, as if she were swallowing. She brooded for
thirteen minutes, absented herself for three minutes, and spent six
minutes in her usual cautionary manoeuvres before resuming her seat.
For the long interval of twenty-two minutes she sat still. Then she
vanished for four minutes, and on her return gave the young another
luncheon, after a fast of one hour and six minutes.

The feeding process, which I had been so desirous to see, was of a sort
to make the spectator shiver. The mother, standing on the edge of the
nest, with her tail braced against its side, like a woodpecker or a
creeper, took a rigidly erect position, and craned her neck until her
bill was in a perpendicular line above the short, wide-open, upraised
beak of the little one, who, it must be remembered, was at this time
hardly bigger than a humble-bee. Then she thrust her bill for its full
length down into his throat, a frightful-looking act, followed by a
series of murderous gesticulations, which fairly made one observer's
blood run cold.

On the day after this (on the 2d of July, that is to say) I climbed into
the tree, in the old bird's absence, and stationed myself where my eyes
were perhaps fifteen feet from the nest, and a foot or two above its
level. At the end of about twenty minutes, the mother, who meantime had
made two visits to the tree, flew into place, and brooded for seventeen
minutes. Then she disappeared again, and on her return, after numberless
pretty feints and sidelong approaches, alighted on the wall of the nest,
and fed both little ones. The operation, though still sufficiently
reckless, looked less like infanticide than before,--a fact due, as I
suppose, to my more elevated position, from which the nestlings' throats
were better seen. After this she brooded for another seventeen minutes.
On the present occasion, as well as on many others, it was noticeable
that, while sitting upon the young, she kept up an almost incessant
motion, as if seeking to warm them, or perhaps to develop their muscles
by a kind of massage treatment. A measure of such hitchings and
fidgetings might have meant nothing more than an attempt to secure for
herself a comfortable seat; but when they were persisted in for fifteen
minutes together, it was difficult not to believe that she had some
different end in view. Possibly, as human infants get exercise by
dandling on the mother's knee, the baby humming-bird gets his by this
parental kneading process. Whether brooding or feeding, it must be said
that the hummer treated her tiny charges with no particular carefulness,
so far as an outsider could judge.

The next day I climbed again into the tree. The mother bird made off at
once, and did not resume her seat for almost an hour, though she would
undoubtedly have done so earlier but for my presence. Again and again
she perched near me, her bill leveled straight at my face. Finally she
alighted on the nest, and, after considerable further delay, as if to
assure herself that everything was quite safe, fed the two chicks from
her throat, as before. "She thrust her bill into their mouths so far" (I
quote my notes) "that the tips of their short little beaks were up
against the root of her mandibles!"

Only once more, on the 4th of July, I ventured into the apple-tree. For
more than an hour and a half I waited. Times without number the mother
came buzzing into the tree, made the circuit of her favorite perches,
dressed her plumage, darted away again, and again returned, till I was
almost driven to get down, for her relief. At last she fed the
nestlings, who by this time must have been all but starved, as indeed
they seemed to be. "The tips of their bills _do_ come clean up to the
base of the mother's mandibles." So I wrote in my journal; for it is the
first duty of a naturalist to verify his own observations.

On the 10th we again brought out the ladder. Though at least eleven days
old, the tiny birds--the "widow's mites," as my facetious neighbor
called them--were still far from filling the cup. While I stood over it,
one of them uttered some pathetic little cries that really went to my
heart. His bill, perceptibly longer than on the 5th, was sticking just
above the border of the nest. I touched it at the tip, but he did not
stir. Craning my neck, I could see his open eye. Poor, helpless things!
Yet within three months they would be flying to Central America, or some
more distant clime. How little they knew what was before them! As little
as I know what is before me.

The violence of the feeding act was now at its height, I think, but it
would be impossible to do justice to it by any description. My neighbor,
who one day stood beside me looking on, was moved to loud laughter. When
the two beaks were tightly joined, and while the old bird's was being
gradually withdrawn, they were shaken convulsively,--by the mother's
attempts to disgorge, and perhaps by the young fellow's efforts to
hasten the operation. It was plain that he let go with reluctance, as a
boy sucks the very tip of the spoon to get the last drop of jam; but, as
will be mentioned in the course of the narrative, his behavior improved
greatly in this respect as he grew older.

On the 12th, just after the little ones had been fed, one of them got
his wings for the first time above the wall of the nest, and fluttered
them with much spirit. He had spent almost a fortnight in the cradle,
and was beginning to think he had been a baby long enough.

From the first I had kept in mind the question whether the feeding of
the young by regurgitation, as described briefly by Audubon, and more in
detail by Mr. William Brewster,[9] would be continued after the
nestlings were fully grown. On the 14th I wrote in my journal: "The
method of feeding remains unchanged, and, as it seems, is likely to
remain so to the end. It must save the mother much labor in going and
coming, and perhaps renders the cooperation of the male parent
unnecessary." This prediction was fulfilled, but with a qualification to
be hereafter specified.

[9] _The Auk_, vol. vii. p. 206.

Every morning, now, I went to the apple-tree uncertain whether the nest
would not be found empty. According to Audubon, Nuttall, Mr. Burroughs,
and Mrs. Treat, young humming-birds stay in the nest only seven days.
Mr. Brewster, in his notes already cited, says that the birds on which
his observations were made--in the garden of Mr. E. S. Hoar, in
Concord--were hatched on the 4th of July,[10] and forsook the nest on
the 18th. My birds were already fifteen days old, at least, and, unless
they were to prove uncommonly backward specimens, ought to be on the
wing forthwith. Nevertheless they were in no haste. Day after day
passed. The youngsters looked more and more like old birds, and the
mother grew constantly more and more nervous.

[10] But Mr. Hoar, from whom Mr. Brewster had his dates, informs me that
the time of hatching was not certainly known; and from Mr. Brewster's
statement about the size of the nestlings, I cannot doubt that they had
been out of the shell some days longer than Mr. Hoar then supposed.

On the 18th I found her in a state of unprecedented excitement,
squeaking almost incessantly. At first I attributed this to concern at
my presence, but after a while it transpired that a young oriole--a
blundering, tailless fellow--was the cause of the disturbance. By some
accident he had dropped into the leafy treetop, as guiltless of any evil
design as one of her own nestlings. How she did buzz about him! In and
out among the branches she went, now on this side of him, now on that,
and now just over his back; all the time squeaking fiercely, and
carrying her tail spread to its utmost. The scene lasted for some
minutes. Through it all the two young birds kept perfectly quiet, never
once putting up their heads, even when the mother, buzzing and calling,
zigzagged directly about the nest. I had seen many birds in the tree,
first and last, but none that created anything like such a stir. The
mother was literally in a frenzy. She went the round of her perches, but
could stay nowhere. Once she dashed out of the tree for an instant, and
drove a sparrow away from the tomato patch. Ordinarily his presence
there would not have annoyed her in the least, but in her present state
of mind she was ready to pounce upon anybody. All of which shows once
more how "human-like" birds are. The bewilderment of the oriole was
comical. "What on earth can this crazy thing be shooting about my ears
in this style for?" I imagined him saying to himself. In fact, as he
glanced my way, now and then, with his innocent baby face, I could
almost believe that he was appealing to me with some such inquiry.

The next morning ("at 7.32," as my diary is careful to note) one of the
twins took his flight. I was standing on the wall, with my glass leveled
upon the nest, when I saw him exercising his wings. The action was
little more pronounced than had been noticed at intervals during the
last three or four days, except that he was more decidedly on his feet.
Suddenly, without making use of the rim of the nest, as I should have
expected him to do, he was in the air, hovering in the prettiest
fashion, and in a moment more had alighted on a leafless twig slightly
above the level of the nest, and perhaps a yard from it. Within a minute
the mother appeared, buzzing and calling, with answering calls from the
youthful adventurer. At once--after a hasty reconnaissance of the man on
the wall--she perched beside him, and plunged her bill into his throat.
Then she went to the nest, served the other one in the same way, and
made off. She had no time to waste at this juncture of affairs.

When she had gone, I stepped up to the trunk of the tree to watch the
little fellow more closely. He held his perch, and occupied himself with
dressing his plumage, though, as the breeze freshened, he was compelled
once in a while to keep his wings in motion to prevent the wind from
carrying him away. When the old bird returned,--in just half an
hour,--she resented my intrusion (what an oppressor of the widow and the
fatherless she must by this time have thought me!) in the most
unmistakable manner, coming more than once quite within reach. However,
she soon gave over these attempts at intimidation, perched beside the
percher, and again put something into his maw. This time she did not
feed the nestling. As she took her departure, she told the
come-outer--or so I fancied--that there was a man under the tree, a
pestilent fellow, and it would be well to get a little out of his reach.
At all events, she had scarcely disappeared before the youngster was
again on the wing. It was wonderful how much at home he
seemed,--poising, backing, soaring, and alighting with all the ease and
grace of an old hand. One only piece of awkwardness I saw him commit: he
dropped upon a branch much too large for his tiny feet, and was
manifestly uncomfortable. But he did not stay long, and at his next
alighting was well up in the tree, where it was noticeable that he
remained ever after.

With so much going on outside, it was hard to remain indoors, and
finally I took a chair to the orchard, and gave myself up to watching
the drama. The feeding process, though still always by regurgitation,
was by this time somewhat different from what it had been when the
bills of the young were less fully developed. In my notes of this date I
find the following description of it: "Number Two is still in the nest,
but uneasy. At 10.25 the mother appeared and fed him.[11] Her beak was
thrust into his mouth at right angles,--the change being necessitated,
probably, by the greater length of his bill,--and he seemed to be
jerking strenuously at it. Then he opened his beak and remained
motionless, while the black mandibles of the mother could be seen
running down out of sight into his throat."

[11] For convenience, I use the masculine pronoun in speaking of both
the young birds; but I knew nothing as to the sex of either of them,
though I came finally to believe that one was a male and the other a
female.

The other youngster, Number One, as I now called him, stayed in the
tree, or at most ventured only into the next one, and was fed at varying
intervals,--as often, apparently, as the busy mother could find anything
to give him. Would he go back to his cradle for the night? It seemed not
improbable, notwithstanding he had shown no sign of such an intention so
long as daylight lasted. At 3.50 the next morning, therefore, I stole
out to see. No: Number Two was there alone.

At seven o'clock, when I made my second visit, the mother was in the
midst of another day's hard work. Twice within five minutes she brought
food to the nestling. Once the little fellow--not so very little
now--happened to be facing east, while the old bird alighted, as she had
invariably done, on the western side. The youngster, instead of facing
about, threw back his head and opened his beak. "Look out, there!"
exclaimed my fellow-observer; "you'll break his neck if you feed him in
that way." But she did not mind. Young birds' necks are not so easily
broken. Within ten minutes of this time she fed Number One, giving him
three doses. They were probably small, however (and small wonder), for
he begged hard for more, opening his bill with an appealing air. The
action in this case was particularly well seen, and the vehement
jerking, while the beaks were glued together, seemed almost enough to
pull the young fellow's head off. Within another ten minutes the mother
was again ministering to Number Two! Poor little widow! Between her
incessant labors of this kind and her overwhelming anxiety whenever any
strange bird came near, I began to be seriously alarmed for her. As a
member of a strictly American family, she was in a fair way, I thought,
to be overtaken by the "most American of diseases,"--nervous
prostration. It tired me to watch her.

With us, and perhaps with her likewise, it was a question whether Number
Two would remain in the nest for the day. He grew more and more
restless; as my companion--a learned man--expressed it, he began to
"ramp round." Once he actually mounted the rim of the nest, a thing
which his more precocious brother had never been seen to do, and
stretched forward to pick at a neighboring stem. Late that afternoon the
mother fed him five times within an hour, instead of once an hour, or
thereabouts, as had been her habit three weeks before. She meant to have
him in good condition for the coming event; and he, on his part, was
active to the same end,--standing upon the wall of the nest again and
again, and exercising his wings till they made a cloud about him. A
dread of launching away still kept him back, however, and shortly after
seven o'clock I found him comfortably disposed for the night. "He is now
on his twenty-first day (at least) in the nest. To-morrow will see him
go." So end my day's notes.

At 5.45 the next morning he was still there. At 6.20 I absented myself
for a few minutes, and on returning was hailed by my neighbor with the
news that the nest was empty. Number Two had flown between 6.25 and
6.30, but, unhappily, neither of us was at hand to give him a cheer. I
trust that he and his mother were not hurt in their feelings by the
oversight. The whole family (minus the father) was still in the
apple-tree; the mother full, and more than full, of business, feeding
one youngster after the other, as they sat here and there in the upper
branches.

Twenty-four hours later, as I stood in the orchard, I heard a hum of
wings, and found the mother over my head. Presently she flew into the
top of the tree, and the next instant was sitting beside one of the
young ones. His hungry mouth was already wide open, but before feeding
him she started up from the twig, and circled about him so closely as
almost or quite to touch him with her wings. On completing the circle
she dropped upon the perch at his side, but immediately rose again, and
again flew round him. It was a beautiful act,--beautiful beyond the
power of any words of mine to set forth; an expression of maternal
ecstasy, I could not doubt, answering to the rapturous caresses and
endearments in which mothers of human infants are so frequently seen
indulging. Three days afterward, to my delight, I saw it repeated in
every particular, as if to confirm my opinion of its significance. The
sight repaid all my watchings thrice over, and even now I feel my heart
growing warm at the recollection of it. Strange thoughtlessness, is it
not, which allows mothers capable of such passionate devotion, tiny,
defenseless things, to be slaughtered by the million for the enhancement
of woman's charms!

At this point we suddenly became aware that for at least a day or two
the old bird had probably been feeding her offspring in two
ways,--sometimes by regurgitation, and sometimes by a simple transfer
from beak to beak. The manner of our discovery was somewhat laughable.
The mother perched beside one of the young birds, put her bill into his,
and then apparently fell off the limb head first. We thought she had not
finished, and looked to see her return; but she flew away, and after a
while the truth dawned upon us. Thereafter, unless our observation was
at fault, she used whichever method happened to suit her convenience. If
she found a choice collection of spiders,[12] for instance, she brought
them in her throat (as cedar-birds carry cherries), to save trips; if
she had only one or two, she retained them between her mandibles. It
will be understood, I suppose, that we did not see the food in its
passage from one bird to the other,--human eyesight would hardly be
equal to work of such nicety; but the two bills were put together so
frequently and in so pronounced a manner as to leave us in no practical
uncertainty about what was going on. Neither had I any doubt that the
change was connected in some way with the increasing age of the
fledgelings; yet it is to be said that the two methods continued to be
used interchangeably to the end, and on the 28th, when Number Two had
been out of the nest for seven days, the mother thrust her bill down his
throat, and repeated the operation, just as she had done three weeks
before.

[12] Mr. E. H. Eames reports (in _The Auk_, vol. vii. p. 287) that, on
dissecting a humming-bird, about two days old, he found sixteen young
spiders in its throat, and a pultaceous mass of the same in its stomach.

For at least two days longer, as I believe, the faithful creature
continued her loving ministrations, although I failed to detect her in
the act. Then, on the 1st of August, as I sat on the piazza, I saw her
for the last time. The honeysuckle vine had served her well, and still
bore half a dozen scattered blossoms, as if for her especial benefit.
She hovered before them, one by one, and in another instant was gone.
May the Fates be kind to her, and to her children after her, to the
latest generation! Our intercourse had lasted for eight weeks,--wanting
one day,--and it was fitting that it should end where it had begun, at
the sign of the honeysuckle.

The absence of the father bird for all this time, though I have
mentioned it but casually, was of course a subject of continual remark.
How was it to be explained? My own opinion is, reluctant as I have been
to reach it, that such absence or desertion--by whatever name it may be
called--is the general habit of the male ruby-throat. Upon this point I
shall have some things to say in a subsequent paper.




THE MALE RUBY-THROAT.

    "Your fathers, where are they?"--ZECHARIAH i. 5.


While keeping daily watch upon a nest of our common humming-bird, in the
summer of 1890, I was struck with the persistent absence of the head of
the family. As week after week elapsed, this feature of the case excited
more and more remark, and I turned to my out-of-door journal for such
meagre notes as it contained of a similar nest found five years before.
From these it appeared that at that time, also, the father bird was
missing. Could such truancy be habitual with the male ruby-throat? I had
never supposed that any of our land birds were given to behaving in this
ill-mannered, unnatural way, and the matter seemed to call for
investigation.

My first resort was, of course, to books. The language of Wilson and
Audubon is somewhat ambiguous, but may fairly be taken as implying the
male bird's presence throughout the period of nidification. Nuttall
speaks explicitly to the same effect, though with no specification of
the grounds on which his statement is based. The later systematic
biographers--Brewer, Samuels, Minot, and the authors of New England Bird
Life--are silent in respect to the point. Mr. Burroughs, in Wake-Robin,
mentions having found two nests, and gives us to understand that he saw
only the female birds. Mrs. Treat, on the other hand, makes the father a
conspicuous figure about the single nest concerning which she reports.
Mr. James Russell Lowell, too, speaks of watching both parents as they
fed the young ones: "The mother always alighted, while the father as
uniformly remained upon the wing."

So far, then, the evidence was decidedly, not to say decisively, in the
masculine ruby-throat's favor. But while I had no desire to make out a
case against him, and in fact was beginning to feel half ashamed of my
uncomplimentary surmises, I was still greatly impressed with what my own
eyes had seen, or rather had not seen, and thought it worth while to
push the inquiry a little further.

I wrote first to Mr. E. S. Hoar, in whose garden Mr. Brewster had made
the observations cited in my previous article. He replied with great
kindness, and upon the point in question said: "I watched the nest two
or three times a day, from a time before the young were hatched till
they departed; and _now you mention it_, it occurs to me that I never
did see the male, but only the white-breasted female."

Next I sought the testimony of professional ornithologists; and here my
worst suspicions seemed in a fair way to be confirmed, although the
greater number of my correspondents were unhappily compelled to plead a
want of knowledge. Dr. A. K. Fisher had found, as he believed, not less
than twenty-five nests, and to the best of his recollection had never
seen a male bird near one of them after it was completed. He had watched
the female feeding her young, and, when the nests contained eggs, had
waited for hours on purpose to secure the male, but always without
result.

Mr. William Brewster wrote: "I have found, or seen _in situ_, twelve
hummers' nests, all in Massachusetts. Of these I took nine, after
watching each a short time, probably not more than an hour or two in any
case. Of the remaining three, I visited one three or four times at
various hours of the day, another only twice, the third but once. Two of
the three contained young when found. The third was supposed to have
young, also, but could not be examined without danger to its contents. I
have never seen a male hummer anywhere near a nest, either before or
after the eggs were laid, but, as you will gather from the above brief
data, my experience has not been extensive; and in the old days, when
most of my nests were found, the methods of close watching now in vogue
were unthought of. In the light of the testimony to which you refer, I
should conclude, with you, that the male hummer must occasionally assist
in the care of the young, but I am very sure that this is not usually,
if indeed often, the case."

Mr. H. W. Henshaw reported a similar experience. He had found four nests
of the ruby-throat, but had seen no male about any of them after
nidification was begun. "I confess," he says, "that I had never thought
of his absence as being other than accidental, and hence have never made
any observations directly upon the point; so that my testimony is of
comparatively little value. In at least one instance, when the female
was building her nest, I remember to have seen the male fly with her and
perch near by, while she was shaping the nest, and then fly off with her
after more material. I don't like to believe that the little villain
leaves the entire task of nidification to his better half (we may well
call her better, if he does); but my memory is a blank so far as
testimony affirmative of his devotion is concerned." Mr. Henshaw recalls
an experience with a nest of the Rivoli humming-bird (_Eugenes
fulgens_), in Arizona,--a nest which he spent two hours in getting. "I
was particularly anxious to secure the male, but did not obtain a
glimpse of him, and I remember thinking that it was very strange." He
adds that Mr. C. W. Richmond has told him of finding a nest and taking
the eggs without seeing the father bird, and sums up his own view of the
matter thus:--

"Had any one asked me offhand, 'Does the male hummer help the female
feed the young?' I am quite sure I should have answered, 'Of course he
does.' As the case now stands, however, I am inclined to believe him a
depraved wretch."

Up to this point the testimony of my correspondents had been unanimous,
but the unanimity was broken by Dr. C. Hart Merriam, who remembers that
on one occasion his attention was called to a nest (it proved to contain
a set of fresh eggs) by the flying of both its owners about his head;
and by Mr. W. A. Jeffries, who in one case saw the father bird in the
vicinity of a nest occupied by young ones, although he did not see him
feed or visit them. This nest, Mr. Jeffries says, was one of five which
he has found. In the four other instances no male birds were observed,
notwithstanding three of the nests were taken,--a tragedy which might be
expected to bring the father of the family upon the scene, if he were
anywhere within call.

In view of the foregoing evidence, it appears to me reasonably certain
that the male ruby-throat, as a rule, takes no considerable part in the
care of eggs and young. The testimony covers not less than fifty nests.
Some of them were watched assiduously, nearly all were examined, and the
greater part were actually taken; yet of the fifty or more male
proprietors, only two were seen; and concerning these exceptions, it is
to be noticed that in one case the eggs were just laid, and in the
other, while the hungry nestlings must have kept the mother bird
extremely busy, her mate was not observed to do anything in the way of
lightening her labors.

As against this preponderance of negative testimony, and in
corroboration of Mr. Lowell's and Mrs. Treat's circumstantial
narratives, there remain to be mentioned the fact communicated to me by
Mr. Hoar, that a townsman of his had at different times had two hummers'
nests in his grounds, the male owners of which were constant in their
attentions, and the following very interesting and surprising story
received from Mr. C. C. Darwin, of Washington, through the kindness of
Mr. Henshaw. Some years ago, as it appears, a pair of ruby-throats built
a nest within a few feet of Mr. Darwin's window and a little below it,
so that they could be watched without fear of disturbing them. He
remembers perfectly that the male fed the female during the entire
period of incubation, "pumping the food down her throat." All this time,
so far as could be discovered, the mother did not once leave the nest
(in wonderful contrast with my bird of a year ago), and of course the
father was never seen to take her place. Mr. Darwin cannot say that the
male ever fed the young ones, but is positive that he was frequently
about the nest after they were hatched. While they were still too young
to fly, a gardener, in pruning the tree, sawed off the limb on which the
nest was built. Mr. Darwin's mother rescued the little ones and fed them
with sweetened water, and on her son's return at night the branch was
fixed in place again, as best it could be, by means of wires. Meanwhile
the old birds had disappeared, having given up their children for lost;
and it was not until the third day that they came back,--by chance,
perhaps, or out of affection for the spot. At once they resumed the care
of their offspring, who by this time, it is safe to say, had become more
or less surfeited with sugar and water, and gladly returned to a diet
of spiders and other such spicy and hearty comestibles.

Mr. Henshaw, with an evident satisfaction which does him honor, remarks
upon the foregoing story as proving that, whatever may be true of male
hummers in general, there are at least some faithful Benedicts among
them. For myself, indeed, as I have already said, I hold no brief
against the ruby-throat, and, notwithstanding the seemingly unfavorable
result of my investigation into his habits as a husband and father, it
is by no means clear to me that we must call him hard names. Before
doing that, we ought to know not only that he stays away from his wife
and children, but _why_ he stays away; whether he is really a shirk, or
absents himself unselfishly and for their better protection, at the risk
of being misunderstood and traduced. My object in this paper is to raise
that question about him, rather than to blacken his character; in a
word, to call attention to him, not as a reprobate, but as a mystery. To
that end I return to the story of my own observations.

In last month's article[13] I set forth somewhat in detail (if the
adverb seem inappropriate, as I fear it will, I can only commend it to
the reader's mercy) the closeness of our watch upon the nest there
described. For more than a month it was under the eye of one or other of
two men almost from morning till night. We did not once detect the
presence of the father, and yet I shall never feel absolutely sure that
he did not one day pay us a visit. I mention the circumstance for what
it may be worth, and because, whatever its import, it was at least a
lively spectacle. It occurred upon this wise: On the 19th of July, the
day when the first of the young birds bade good-by to its cradle, I had
gone into the house, leaving my fellow-observer in the orchard, with a
charge to call me if anything noteworthy should happen. I was hardly
seated before he whistled loudly, and I hastened out again. Another
hummer had been there, he said, and the mother had been chasing him (or
her) about in a frantic manner; and even while we were talking, the
scene was re-enacted. The stranger had returned, and the two birds were
shooting hither and thither through the trees, the widow squeaking and
spreading her tail at a prodigious rate. The new-comer did not alight
(it couldn't), and there was no determining its sex. It may have been
the recreant husband and father, unable longer to deny himself a look at
his bairns,--who knows? Or it may have been some bachelor or widower who
had come a-wooing. One thing is certain,--husband, lover, or inquisitive
stranger, he had no encouragement to come again.

[13] These two humming-bird papers were printed in consecutive numbers
of _The Atlantic Monthly_, June and July, 1891.

As if to heighten the dramatic interest of our studies (I come now to
the promised mystery), we had already had the singular good fortune to
find a male humming-bird who seemed to be stationed permanently in a
tall ash-tree, standing by itself in a recent clearing, at a distance of
a mile or more from our widow's orchard. Day after day, for at least a
fortnight (from the 2d to the 15th of July), he remained there. One or
both of us went almost daily to call upon him, and, as far as we could
make out, he seldom absented himself from his post for five minutes
together! What was he doing? At first, in spite of his sex, it was hard
not to believe that his nest was in the tree; and to satisfy himself, my
companion "shinned" it, schoolboy fashion,--a frightful piece of work,
which put me out of breath even to look at it,--while I surveyed the
branches from all sides through an opera-glass. All was without avail.
Nothing was to be seen, and it was as good as certain, the branches
being well separated, and easily overlooked, that there was nothing
there.

Four days later I set out alone, to try my luck with the riddle. As I
entered the clearing, the hummer was seen at his post, and my suspicions
fastened upon a small wild apple-tree, perhaps twenty rods distant. I
went to examine it, and presently the bird followed me. He perched in
its top, but seemed not to be jealous of my proximity, and soon returned
to his customary position; but when I came back to the apple-tree, after
a visit to a clump of oaks at the top of the hill, he again came over. I
could find no sign of a nest, however, nor did the female show herself,
as she pretty confidently might have been expected to do had her nest
been near by. After this I went to the edge of the wood, where I could
keep an eye upon both trees without being myself conspicuous. The
sentinel spent most of his time in the ash, visiting the apple-tree but
once, and then for a few minutes only. I stayed an hour and a half, and
came away no wiser than before. The nest, if nest there was, must be
elsewhere, I believed. But where? And what was the object of the male's
watch?

My curiosity was fully roused. I had never seen or heard of such conduct
on the part of any bird, and the next forenoon I spent another hour and
a half in the clearing. The hummer was at his post, as he always was. We
had never to wait for him. Soon after my arrival he flew to the
apple-tree, the action seeming to have no connection with my presence.
Presently he went back to the ash, and drove out of it two intruding
birds. A moment later two humming-birds were there, and in another
moment they flew away in a direction opposite to the apple-tree. Here,
then, was a real clue. The birds were probably our sentinel and his
mate. I made after them with all speed, pausing under such scattered
trees as had been left standing in that quarter. Nothing was to be
found, and on my return there sat the male, provokingly, at the top of
the apple-tree, whence he soon returned to the ash. A warbler entered
the tree, and after a while ventured upon the branch where the hummer
was sitting. Instead of driving her away he took wing himself, and paid
another visit to the apple-tree,--a visit of perhaps five minutes,--at
the end of which he went back to the ash. Then two kingbirds happened to
alight in the apple-tree. At once the hummer came dashing over and
ordered them off, and in his excitement dropped for a moment into the
leafy top of a birch sapling,--a most unnatural proceeding,--after which
he resumed his station in the ash. What could I make of all this?
Apparently he claimed the ownership of both trees, and yet his nest was
in neither! He sat motionless for five minutes at a time upon certain
dead twigs of the ash, precisely as our female was accustomed to sit in
her apple-tree. For at least seven days he had been thus occupied. Where
was his mate? On the edge of the wood, perhaps. But, if so, why did I
hear nothing from her, as I passed up and down? Again my hour and a half
had been spent to no purpose.

Not yet discouraged, I returned the next morning. For the three quarters
of an hour that I remained, the hummer was not once out of the ash-tree
for five minutes. I am not sure that he left it for five minutes
altogether. As usual, he perched almost without exception on one or
other of two dead limbs, while a similar branch, on the opposite side of
the trunk, he was never seen to touch. A Maryland yellow-throat alighted
on one of his two branches and began to sing, but had repeated his
strain only three or four times before the hummer, who had been absent
for the moment, darted upon him and put him to flight. A little
afterward, a red-eyed vireo alighted on his other favorite perch, and he
showed no resentment. The day before, a warbler had sat on the same
branch which the yellow-throat now invaded, and the hummer not only did
not offer to molest him, but flew away himself. These inconsistencies
made it hard to draw any inference from his behavior. During my whole
stay he did not once go to the apple-tree, although, for want of
anything better to do, I again scrutinized its branches. This time I
_was_ discouraged, and gave over the search. His secret, whatever it
might be, was "too dear for my possessing." But my fellow-observer kept
up his visits, as I have said, and the hummer remained faithful to his
task as late as July 15th, at least.

Some readers may be prompted to ask, as one of my correspondents asked
at the time, whether the mysterious sentry may not have been the mate of
our home bird. I see no ground for such a suspicion. The two places were
at least a mile apart, as I have already mentioned, and woods and hills,
to say nothing of the village, lay between. If he was our bird's mate,
his choice of a picket station was indeed an enigma. He might almost as
well have been on Mount Washington. Nor can I believe that he had any
connection with a nest found two months afterward in a pitch-pine grove
within a quarter of a mile, more or less, of his clearing. It was
undoubtedly a nest of that season, and might have been his for aught I
know, so far as the mere fact of distance was concerned; but here again
an intervening wood must have cut off all visual communication. If his
mate and nest were not within view from his ash-tree perch, what could
be the meaning of his conduct? Without some specific constraining
motive, no bird in his normal condition was likely to stay in one tree
hour after hour, day after day, and week after week, so that one could
never come in sight of it without seeing him. But even if his nest was
in the immediate neighborhood, the closeness and persistency of his
lookout are still, to my mind, an absolute mystery. Our female bird,
whether she had eggs or offspring, made nothing of absenting herself by
the half hour; but this male hardly gave himself time to eat his
necessary food; indeed, I often wondered how he kept himself alive. Is
such a course of action habitual with male hummers? If so, had our
seemingly widowed or deserted mother a husband, who somewhere, unseen by
us, was standing sentry after the same heroic, self-denying fashion?
These and all similar questions I must leave to more fortunate
observers, or postpone to a future summer. Meantime, my judgment as to
the male ruby-throat's character remains in suspense. It is not plain to
me whether we are to call him the worst or the best of husbands.




ROBIN ROOSTS.

    "From every side they hurried in,
     Rubbing their sleepy eyes."
                                KEATS.


Of all the nearly eight hundred species of North American birds, the
robin is without question the one most generally known. Its great
commonness and wide distribution have something to do with this fact,
but can hardly be said to account for it altogether. The red-eyed vireo
has almost as extensive a range, and at least in New England is possibly
more numerous; but except among ornithologists it remains a stranger,
even to country-bred people. The robin owes its universal recognition
partly to its size and perfectly distinctive dress, partly to its early
arrival in the spring, but especially to the nature of its nesting and
feeding habits, which bring it constantly under every one's eye.

It would seem impossible, at this late day, to say anything new about
so familiar a bird; but the robin has one interesting and remarkable
habit, to which there is no allusion in any of our systematic
ornithological treatises, so far as I am aware, although many individual
observers must have taken notice of it. I mean the habit of roosting at
night in large flocks, while still on its breeding grounds, and long
before the close of the breeding season.[14]

[14] Mr. William Brewster has been aware of this habit for twenty-five
years, but, like myself, has never seen it mentioned in print. He
devotes to it a paper in _The Auk_ for October, 1890, to which I am
happy to refer readers who may wish a more thorough discussion of the
matter than I have been able to give. My own paper was printed at the
same time, in _The Atlantic Monthly_, and had been accepted by the
editor before I knew of Mr. Brewster's intention to write. References to
a roost in Belmont, Mass., discovered by Mr. Brewster six years before,
are frequent in the following pages.

Toward the end of summer, two years ago, I saw what looked like a daily
passage back and forth of small companies of robins. A friend, living in
another town, had noticed similar occurrences, and more than once we
discussed the subject; agreeing that such movements were probably not
connected in any way with the grand southward migration, which, so far
as we could judge, had not yet commenced, but that the birds must be
flying to and from some nightly resort. The flocks were small, however,
and neither of us suspected the full significance of what we had seen.

On the 19th of July, 1889, the same friend informed me that one of our
Cambridge ornithologists had found a robin roost in that city,--a wood
in which great numbers of birds congregated every night. This led me to
keep a sharper eye upon my own robins, whom I had already noticed
repeating their previous year's manoeuvres. Every evening, shortly
before and after sunset, they were to be seen flying, now singly, now by
twos and threes, or even by the half dozen, evidently on their way to
some rendezvous. I was suspicious of a rather distant hill-top covered
with pine-trees; but before I could make it convenient to visit the
place at the proper hour, I discovered, quite unexpectedly, that the
roost was close by the very road up and down which I had been walking;
an isolated piece of swampy wood, a few acres in extent, mostly a dense
growth of gray birches and swamp white oaks, but with a sprinkling of
maples and other deciduous trees. It is bounded on the further side by a
wet meadow, and at the eastern end by a little ice-pond, with a
dwelling-house and other buildings beside it, all within a stone's throw
of the wood.

This discovery was made on the evening of July 25th, and I at once
crossed a narrow field between the wood and the highway, and pushed in
after the birds. It was too dark for me to see what was going on, but as
I brushed against the close branches the robins set up a lively
cackling, and presently commenced flying from tree to tree before me as
I advanced, though plainly with no intention of deserting their
quarters. The place was full of them, but I could form no estimate of
their number.

On the following evening I took my stand upon a little knoll commanding
the western end of the wood. According to my notes, the birds began to
arrive about sunset,--but this was pretty certainly an error,--and
though I did not undertake an exact count until the flight was mainly
over, it seemed likely that at least three hundred passed in at that
point. This would have made the total number twelve hundred, or
thereabout, on the assumption that my outlook had covered a quarter of
the circuit. After the flight ceased I went into the wood, and from the
commotion overhead it was impossible not to believe that such a
calculation must be well within the truth.

The next day was rainy, but on the evening of the 28th I stood by the
shore of the pond, on the eastern side of the wood, and made as accurate
a count as possible of the arrivals at that point. Unfortunately I was
too late; the robins were already coming. But in fifty minutes, between
6.40 and 7.30, I counted 1072 birds. They appeared singly and in small
flocks, and it was out of the question for me to make sure of them all;
while I was busy with a flock on the right, there was no telling how
many might be passing in on the left. If my observations comprehended a
quarter of the circle, and if the influx was equally great on the other
sides (an assumption afterward disproved), then it was safe to set the
whole number of birds at five thousand or more. Of the 1072 actually
seen, 797 came before the sunset gun was fired,--a proportion somewhat
larger than it would have been had the sky been clear.

On the afternoon of the 29th I again counted the arrivals at the eastern
end; but though I set out, as I thought, in good season, I found myself
once more behind time. At 6.30 robins were already dropping in,
notwithstanding the sky was cloudless. In the first five minutes
eighteen birds appeared; at sunset 818 had been counted; and at 7.30,
when I came away, the figures stood at 1267. "The robins came more
rapidly than last night," I wrote in my notebook, "and for much of the
time I could keep watch of the southeastern corner only. My vision then
covered much less than a quarter of the circuit; so that if the birds
came as freely from other directions, at least five thousand must have
entered the wood between 6.30 and 7.30. As long as it was light they
avoided passing directly by me, going generally to the left, and
slipping into the roost behind some low outlying trees; though,
fortunately, in doing this they were compelled to cross a narrow patch
of the illuminated western sky. I suspect that the number increases from
night to night. Between 6.40 and 7.30, 1235 birds came, as compared
with 1072 last evening."

Two days afterward (July 31st) I went to the western end of the wood,
and found the influx there much smaller than on the opposite side; but I
arrived late, and made a partial count only. After sunset 186 birds were
seen, whereas there had been 455 entries at the eastern end, two nights
before, during the same time.

Thus far I had always been too late to witness the beginning of the
flight. On the evening of August 1st I resolved to be in season. I
reached the border of the pond at 5.15, and at that very moment a single
robin flew into the wood. No others were seen for eighteen minutes, when
three arrived together. From this time stragglers continued to appear,
and at 6.30 I had counted 176. In the next ten minutes 180 arrived; in
the next five minutes, 138. Between 6.45 and 7, I counted 549; then, in
six minutes, 217 appeared. At 7.25, when I concluded, the figures stood
at 1533 birds. For about twenty minutes, as will be noticed, the
arrivals were at the rate of thirty-six a minute. Throughout the
thickest of the flight I could keep a lookout upon only one side of me,
and, moreover, the gathering darkness was by that time making it more
and more difficult to see any birds except such as passed above the dark
tree line; and from what went on just about me, it was evident that the
number of arrivals was increasing rather than diminishing as my count
fell off. There seemed to be no good reason for doubting that at least
two thousand robins entered the wood at the eastern end.

Two nights later I stationed myself in the meadow southwest of the
roost. Here I counted but 935 entries. The movement appeared to be fully
as steady as on the opposite side, but as darkness came on I found
myself at a great disadvantage; a hill occupied the background, giving
me no illuminated sky to bring the birds into relief, so that I could
see only such as passed close at hand. Of the 935 birds, 761 came before
seven o'clock, but it was reasonably certain that the flight afterward
was nearly or quite as great, only that I wanted light wherewith to see
it.

On the evening of August 4th I went back to the eastern end, and as the
sky was perfectly clear I hoped to make a gain upon all my previous
figures. But the fair weather was perhaps a hindrance rather than a
help; for the robins came later than before, and more in a body, and
continued to arrive long after it was impossible to see them. I counted
1480,--53 less than on the 1st.

I attempted no further enumeration until the 18th. Then, in an hour and
ten minutes, 1203 birds were seen to enter the roost at the eastern end.
But they arrived more than ever in flocks, and so late that for much of
the time I missed all except the comparatively small number that passed
in my immediate vicinity. Many were flying at a great height,--having
come from a long distance, as I inferred,--and sometimes I knew nothing
of their approach till they dropped out of the sky directly over the
wood. On this occasion, as well as on many others,--but chiefly during
the latter part of the season,--it was noticeable that some of the
robins appeared to be ignorant of the precise whereabouts of the roost;
they flew past it at first, and then, after more or less circling about,
with loud cackling, dived hurriedly into the wood. I took special note
of one fellow, who came from the south at a great altitude, and went
directly over the wood. When he was well past it he suddenly pulled
himself up, as if fancying he had caught a signal. After a moment of
hesitation he proceeded on his northerly course, but had not gone far
before he met half a dozen birds flying south. Perhaps he asked them the
way. At all events, he wheeled about and joined them, and in half a
minute was safe in port. He had heard of the roost, apparently (how and
where?), but had not before visited it.

This count of August 18th was the last for nearly a month, but I find a
minute of August 27th stating that, while walking along the highway on
the westerly side of the roost,--the side that had always been the least
populous,--I saw within less than two minutes (as I calculated the time)
more than eighty robins flying toward the wood. Up to this date, then,
there could not have been any considerable falling off in the size of
the gathering. Indeed, from my friend's observations upon the Belmont
roost, to be mentioned later, it seems well-nigh certain that it was
still upon the increase.

Toward the close of August I became interested in the late singing of
several whippoorwills, and so was taken away from the robins' haunt at
the hour of sunset. Then, from the 5th to the 13th of September, I was
absent from home. On the night of my return I went to the shore of the
pond, where, on the 1st of August, I had counted 1533 entries. The
weather was favorable, and I arrived in good season and remained till
the stars came out, but I counted only 137 robins! It was plain that the
great majority of the congregation had departed.

As I have said, there was little to be learned by going into the wood
after the robins were assembled. Nevertheless I used frequently to
intrude upon them, especially as friends or neighbors, who had heard of
my "discovery," were desirous to see the show. The prodigious cackling
and rustling overhead seemed to make a deep impression upon all such
visitors, while, for myself, I should have had no difficulty in
crediting the statement had I been told that _ten thousand_ robins were
in the treetops. One night I took two friends to the place after it was
really dark. All was silent as we felt our way among the trees, till,
suddenly, one of the trio struck a match and kindled a blaze of dry
twigs. The smoke and flame speedily waked the sleepers; but even then
they manifested no disposition to be driven out.

For curiosity's sake, I paid one early morning visit to the roost, on
the 30th of July. It would be worth while, I thought, to see how much
music so large a chorus would make, as well as to note the manner of its
dispersion. To tell the truth, I hoped for something spectacular,--a
grand burst of melody, and then a pouring forth of a dense, uncountable
army of robins. I arrived about 3.40 (it was still hardly light enough
to show the face of the watch), and found everything quiet. Pretty soon
the robins commenced cackling. At 3.45 a song sparrow sang, and at the
same moment I saw a robin fly out of the wood. Five minutes later a
robin sang; at 3.55 another one flew past me; at four o'clock a few of
the birds were in song, but the effect was not in any way
peculiar,--very much as if two or three had been singing in the ordinary
manner. They dispersed precisely as I had seen them gather: now a
single bird, now two or three, now six, or even ten. A casual passer
along the road would have remarked nothing out of the common course.
They flew low,--not as if they were starting upon any prolonged
flight,--and a goodly number alighted for a little in the field where I
was standing. Shortly before sunrise I went into the wood and found it
deserted. The robin is one of our noisiest birds. Who would have
believed that an assembly of thousands could break up so quietly? Their
behavior in this regard may possibly have been influenced by prudential
considerations. I have said that many of them seemingly took pains to
approach the roost indirectly and under cover. On the westerly side, for
example, they almost invariably followed a line of bushes and trees
which runs toward the roost along the edge of the meadow, even though
they were obliged sharply to alter their course in so doing.

All this time I had been in correspondence with my friend before
referred to, who was studying a similar roost,[15]--in Belmont,--which
proved to be more populous than mine, as was to be expected, perhaps,
the surrounding country being less generally wooded. It was a mile or
more from his house, which was so situated that he could sit upon his
piazza in the evening and watch the birds streaming past. On the 11th of
August he counted here 556 robins, of which 336 passed within five
minutes. On the 28th he counted 1180, of which 456 passed within five
minutes,--ninety-one a minute! On the 2d of September, from a knoll
nearer the roost, he counted 1883 entries.

[15] This roost was discovered by Mr. William Brewster, in August, 1884,
as already mentioned.

This gathering, like the one in Melrose, was greatly depleted by the
middle of September. "Only 109 robins flew over the place to-night," my
correspondent wrote on the 25th, "against 538 September 4th, 838 August
30th, and 1180 August 28th." Two evenings later (September 27th) he went
to the neighborhood of the roost, and counted 251 birds,--instead of
1883 on the 2d. Even so late as October 9th, however, the wood was not
entirely deserted. During the last month or so of its occupancy, the
number of the birds was apparently subject to sudden and wide
fluctuations, and it seemed not unlikely that travelers from the north
were making a temporary use of the well-known resort. It would not be
surprising if the same were found to be true in the spring. In April,
1890, I saw some things which pointed, as I thought, in this direction,
but I was then too closely occupied to follow the matter.

How early in the season does this nightly flocking begin? This question
often presented itself. It was only the middle of July when the
Cambridge roost was found in full operation, though at that time many
robins must still have had family duties, and some were probably
building new nests. Next summer, we said, we would try to mark the
beginnings of the congregation.

My own plans to this end came near being thwarted. In December I was
dismayed to see the owner of the wood cutting it down. Happily some kind
power stayed his hand when not more than a third of the mischief was
done, and on the 29th of June, 1890, while strolling homeward along the
highway, listening to the distant song of a veery, I noticed within five
or ten minutes seventeen robins making toward the old rendezvous. On
the following evening I stood beside the ice-pond and saw one hundred
and ninety-two robins enter the wood. The flight had begun before my
arrival, and was not entirely over when I came away. Evidently several
hundreds of the birds were already passing their nights in company. In
my ignorance, I was surprised at the early date; but when I communicated
my discovery to the Belmont observer, he replied at once that he had
noticed a movement of the same kind on the 11th of June. The birds,
about a dozen, were seen passing his house.

Thinking over the matter, I began to ask myself--though I hesitate about
making such a confession--whether it might not be the adult males who
thus unseasonably went off to bed in a crowd, leaving their mates to
care for eggs and little ones. At this very moment, as it happened, I
was watching with lively sympathy the incessant activities of a female
humming-bird, who appeared to be bringing up a family (two very hungry
nestlings), with no husband to lift a finger for her assistance; and the
sight, as I fear, put me into a cynical mood. Male robins were probably
like males in general,--lovers of clubs and shirkers of home duties.
Indeed, a friend who went into the roost with me, one evening, remarked
upon the continual cackling in the treetops as "a very social sound;"
and upon my saying something about a sewing circle, he answered, quite
seriously, "No, it is rather like a gentleman's club." But it would have
been unscientific, as well as unchristian, to entertain an hypothesis
like this without putting its soundness to some kind of test. I adopted
the only plan that occurred to me,--short of rising at half past two
o'clock in the morning to see the birds disperse. I entered the wood
just before the assemblage was due (this was on the 9th of July), and
took a sheltered position on the eastern edge, where, as the robins flew
by me, or alighted temporarily in the trees just across the brook, they
would have the sunlight upon their breasts. Here, as often as one came
sufficiently near and in a sufficiently favorable light, I noted whether
it was an adult, or a streaked, spotted bird of the present season. As a
matter of course, the number concerning which this point could be
positively determined under such conditions was very small,--only
fifty-seven altogether. Of these, forty-nine were surely birds of the
present summer, and only eight unmistakable adult males. If any adult
females came in, they passed among the unidentified and uncounted.[16] I
was glad I had made the test. As a kind-hearted cynic (I confess to
being nothing worse than this), I was relieved to find my misanthropic,
or, to speak more exactly, my misornithic, notions ill founded. As for
the sprinkling of adult males, they may have been, as a "friend and
fellow woodlander" suggests, birds which, for one reason or another, had
taken up with the detestable opinion that "marriage is a failure."

[16] A week later, my correspondent reported a similar state of things
at the Belmont roost. "A very large proportion of the birds are
spotted-breasted young of the year, but occasionally I have detected an
adult male." He examined the birds at near range, and at rest, after
they had come into the roost in the earlier part of the evening.

During the month of July, 1890, I made frequent counts of the entries at
the eastern end of the roost, thinking thus to ascertain in a general
way the rate at which its population increased. On the whole, the growth
proved to be fairly steady, in spite of some mysterious fluctuations, as
will be seen by the following table:--

    July  3   247
     "    5   383
     "    6   356
     "   10   765
     "   12   970
     "   14  1120
     "   16  1064
     "   17  1333
     "   19  1584
     "   22  1520
     "   23  1453
     "   27  2314

After July 6th all the enumerations were made with the help of another
man, though we stood side by side, and covered no more ground than I had
hitherto attempted to compass alone. The figures of the 27th were far in
excess of any obtained in 1889, and for a day I was disposed to take
seriously the suggestion of a friend that some other roost must have
been broken up and its members turned into the Melrose gathering. But on
the evening of the 28th I tried a count by myself, and made only 1517
birds! The conditions were favorable, and the robins came, as they had
come the night before, in flocks, almost in continuous streams. The
figures had fallen off, not because there were fewer birds, but because
I was unable to count them. They were literally too many for me. The
difficulties of the work, it should be explained, are greatly enhanced
by the fact that at the very corner where the influx is largest none of
the low-flying birds can be seen except for a second or two, as they
dart across a bit of sky between the roost and an outlying wood. To
secure anything like a complete census, this point must be watched
continuously; and meantime birds are streaming in at the other corner
and shooting over the distracted enumerator's head, and perhaps dropping
out of the sky. I conclude, therefore, not that the roost had increased
in population, but that my last year's reckoning was even more
inadequate than I then supposed. Even with two pairs of eyes, it is
inevitable that multitudes of birds should pass in unnoticed, especially
during the latter half of the flight. I have never had an assistant or a
looker-on to whom this was not perfectly apparent.

As I stood night after night watching the robins stream into this little
wood,--no better, surely, than many they had passed on their way,--I
asked myself again and again what could be the motive that drew them
together. The flocking of birds for a long journey, or in the winter
season, is less mysterious. In times of danger and distress there is no
doubt a feeling of safety in a crowd. But robins cannot be afraid of the
dark. Why, then, should not each sleep upon its own feeding grounds,
alone, or with a few neighbors for company, instead of flying two or
three miles, more or less, twice a day, simply for the sake of passing
the night in a general roost?

Such questions we must perhaps be content to ask without expecting an
answer. By nature the robin is strongly gregarious, and though his
present mode of existence does not permit him to live during the summer
in close communities,--as marsh wrens do, for example, and some of our
swallows,--his ancestral passion for society still asserts itself at
nightfall. Ten or twelve years ago, when I was bird-gazing in Boston,
there were sometimes a hundred robins at once about the Common and
Garden, in the time of the vernal migration. By day they were scattered
over the lawns; but at sunset they gathered habitually in two or three
contiguous trees, not far from the Frog Pond and the Beacon Street Mall
(I wonder whether the same trees are still in use for the same purpose),
where, after much noise and some singing, they retired to rest,--if
going to sleep in a leafless treetop can be called retiring.

Whatever the origin and reason of this roosting habit, I have no doubt
that it is universal. Middlesex County birds cannot be in any respect
peculiar. Whoever will keep a close eye upon the robins in his
neighborhood, in July and August, will find them at sunset flocking to
some general sleeping-place.

It would be interesting to know how far they travel at such times. The
fact that so many hundreds were to be seen at a point more than a mile
away from the Belmont roost is significant; but I am not aware that any
one has yet made a study of this part of the subject. My own birds
seemed to come, as a rule, by easy stages. In the long narrow valley
east of the roost, where I oftenest watched their approach, they
followed habitually--not invariably--a zigzag route, crossing the meadow
diagonally, and for the most part alighting for a little upon a certain
wooded hill, whence they took a final flight to their nightly haven,
perhaps a quarter of a mile beyond. Farther down the valley, a mile or
more from the roost, birds were to be seen flying toward it, but I found
no place at which a general movement could be observed and large numbers
counted.

As to the size of these nightly gatherings, it seems wisest not to
guess; though, treating the subject in this narrative manner, I have not
scrupled to mention, simply as a part of the story, some of my temporary
surmises. What I am told of the Belmont wood is true also of the one in
Melrose: its shape and situation are such as to make an accurate census
impossible, no matter how many "enumerators" might be employed. It could
be surrounded easily enough, but it would be out of the question to
divide the space among the different men so that no two of them should
count the same birds. At present it can only be said that the robins are
numbered by thousands; in some cases, perhaps, by tens of thousands.




THE PASSING OF THE BIRDS.

    "The Bird of Time has but a little way
     To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing."
                              OMAR KHAYYAM.


By the first of August the bird-lover's year is already on the wane. In
the chestnut grove, where a month ago the wood thrush, the rose-breasted
grosbeak, and the scarlet tanager were singing, the loiterer now hears
nothing but the wood pewee's pensive whistle and the sharp monotony of
the red-eyed vireo. The thrasher is silent in the berry pasture, and the
bobolink in the meadow. The season of jollity is over. Orioles, to be
sure, after a month of silence, again have fits of merry fifing. The
field sparrow and the song sparrow are still in tune, and the meadow
lark whistles, though rarely. Catbirds still practice their feeble
improvisations and mimicries in the thickets along the brooksides as
evening comes on, and of the multitudes of robins a few are certain to
be heard warbling before the day is over. Goldfinches have grown
suddenly numerous, or so it seems, and not infrequently one of them
breaks out in musical canary-like twitterings. On moonlight evenings the
tremulous, haunting cry of the screech-owl comes to your ears, always
from far away, and if you walk through the chestnut grove aforesaid in
the daytime you may chance to catch his faint, vibratory, tree-frog
whistle. For myself, I never enter the grove without glancing into the
dry top of a certain tall tree, to see whether the little rascal is
sitting in his open door. More than half the time he is there, and
always with his eye on me. What an air he has!--like a judge on the
bench! If I were half as wise as he looks, these essays of mine would
never more be dull. For his and all other late summer music let us be
thankful; but it is true, nevertheless, that the year is waning. How
short it has been! Only the other day the concert opened, and already
the performers are uneasy to be gone. They have crowded so much into so
brief a space! The passion of a life-time into the quarter of a year!
They are impatient to be gone, I say; but who knows how many of them
are gone already? Where are the blue golden-winged warblers that sang
daily on the edge of the wood opposite my windows, so that I listened to
them at my work? I have heard nothing of their rough _dsee, dsee_ since
the 21st of June, and in all that time have seen them but once--a single
bird, a youngling of the present year, stumbled upon by accident while
pushing my way through a troublesome thicket on the first day of August.
Who knows, I say, how many such summer friends have already left us? An
odd coincidence, however, warns me at this very moment that too much is
not to be made of merely negative experiences; for even while I was
penciling the foregoing sentence about the blue golden-wing there came
through the open window the hoarse upward-sliding chant of his close
neighbor, the prairie warbler. I have not heard that sound before since
the 6th of July, and it is now the 22d of August. The singers had not
gone, I knew; I saw several of them (and beautiful creatures they are!)
a few days ago among the pitch pines; but why did that fellow, after
being dumb for six or seven weeks, pipe up at that precise moment, as
if to punctuate my ruminations with an interrogation point? Does he like
this dog-day morning, with its alternate shower and sunshine, and its
constant stickiness and heat? In any case I was glad to hear him, though
I cannot in the spirit of veracity call him a good singer. Whist! There
goes an oriole, a gorgeous creature, flashing from one elm to another,
and piping in his happiest manner as he flies. It might be the middle of
May, to judge from his behavior. _He_ likes dog-day weather, there can
be no question of that, however the rest of the world may grumble.

This is a time when one sees many birds, but few species. Bluebirds are
several times as abundant as in June. The air is sweet with their calls
at this moment, and once in a while some father of the flock lets his
happiness run over in song. One cannot go far now without finding the
road full of chipping sparrows, springing up in their pretty,
characteristic way, and letting the breeze catch them. The fences and
wayside apple-trees are lively with kingbirds and phoebes. I am
already watching the former with a kind of mournful interest. In ten
days, or some such matter, we shall have seen the last of their saucy
antics. Gay tyrants! They are among the first birds of whom I can
confidently say, "They are gone;" and they seem as wide-awake when they
go as when they come. Being a man, I regret their departure; but if I
were a crow, I think I should be for observing the 31st of August as a
day of annual jubilee.

A few years ago, in September, I saw the white-breasted swallows
congregated in the Ipswich dunes,--a sight never to be forgotten. On the
morning of the 9th, the fourth day of our visit, a considerable
flock--but no more, perhaps, than we had been seeing daily--came
skimming over the marshes and settled upon a sand-bar in the river,
darkening it in patches. At eight o'clock, when we took the straggling
road out of the hills, a good many--there might be a thousand, I
guessed--sat, upon the fence wires, as if resting. We walked inland, and
on our return, at noon, found, as my notes of the day express it, "an
innumerable host, thousands upon thousands," about the landward side of
the dunes. Fences and haycocks were covered. Multitudes were on the
ground,--in the bed of the road, about the bare spots in the marsh, and
on the gray faces of the hills. Other multitudes were in the bushes and
low trees, literally loading them. Every few minutes a detachment would
rise into the air like a cloud, and anon settle down again. As we stood
gazing at the spectacle, my companion began chirping at a youngster who
sat near him on a post, as one might chirp to a caged canary. The effect
was magical. The bird at once started toward him, others followed, and
in a few seconds hundreds were flying about our heads. Round and round
they went, almost within reach, like a cloud of gnats. "Stop! stop!"
cried my companion; "I am getting dizzy." We stopped our squeakings, and
the cloud lifted; but I can see it yet. Day after day the great
concourse remained about the hills, till on the 13th we came away and
left them. The old lighthouse keeper told me that this was their annual
rendezvous. He once saw them circle for a long time above the dunes, for
several hours, if I remember right, till, as it seemed, all stragglers
had been called in from the beach, the marsh, and the outlying grassy
hills. Then they mounted into the sky in a great spiral till they
passed out of sight; and for that year there were no more swallows.
This, he insisted, took place in the afternoon, "from three to four
o'clock." He was unquestionably telling a straightforward story of what
he himself had seen, but his memory may have been at fault; for I find
it to be the settled opinion of those who ought to know, that swallows
migrate by day and not by night, while the setting out of a great flock
late in the afternoon at such a height would seem to indicate a
nocturnal journey. Morning or evening, I would give something to witness
so imposing a start.

The recollection of this seaside gathering raises anew in my mind the
question why, if swallows and swifts migrate exclusively in the daytime,
we so rarely see anything of them on the passage. Our Ipswich birds were
all tree swallows,--white-breasted martins,--and might fairly be
supposed to have come together from a comparatively limited extent of
country. But beside tree swallows there are purple martins, barn
swallows, sand martins, cliff swallows, and chimney swifts, all of which
breed to the northward of us in incalculable numbers. All of them go
south between the middle of July and the first of October. But who in
New England has ever seen any grand army of them actually on the wing?
Do they straggle along so loosely as to escape particular notice? If so,
what mean congregations like that in the Ipswich dunes? Or are their
grand concerted flights taken at such an altitude as to be invisible?

On several afternoons of last September, this time in an inland country,
I observed what might fairly be called a steady stream of tree swallows
flying south. Twice, while gazing up at the loose procession, I suddenly
became aware of a close bunch of birds at a prodigious height, barely
visible, circling about in a way to put a count out of the question, but
evidently some hundreds in number. On both occasions the flock vanished
almost immediately, and, as I believed, by soaring out of sight. The
second time I meant to assure myself upon this point, but my attention
was distracted by the sudden appearance of several large hawks within
the field of my glass, and when I looked again for the swallows they
were nowhere to be seen. Were the stragglers which I had for some time
been watching, flying high, but well within easy ken, and these dense,
hardly discernible clusters--hirundine nebulae, as it were--were all
these but parts of one innumerable host, the main body of which was
passing far above me altogether unseen? The conjecture was one to
gratify the imagination. It pleased me even to think that it _might_ be
true. But it was only a conjecture, and meantime another question
presented itself.

When this daily procession had been noticed for two or three afternoons,
it came to me as something remarkable that I saw it always in the same
place, or rather on the same north and south line, while no matter where
else I walked, east or west, not a swallow was visible. Had I stumbled
upon a regular route of swallow migration? It looked so, surely; but I
made little account of the matter till a month afterward, when, in
exactly the same place, I observed robins and bluebirds following the
same course. The robins were seen October 26th, in four flocks,
succeeding each other at intervals of a few minutes, and numbering in
all about 130 birds. They flew directly south, at a moderate height,
and were almost certainly detachments of one body. The bluebird movement
was two days later, at about the same hour, the morning being cold, with
a little snow falling. This time, too, as it happened, the flock was in
four detachments. Three of these were too compact to be counted as they
passed; the fourth and largest one was in looser order and contained a
little more than a hundred individuals. In all, as well as I could
guess, there might have been about three hundred birds. They kept a
straight course southward, flying high, and with the usual calls, which,
in autumn at least, always have to my ears a sound of farewell. Was it a
mere coincidence that these swallows, bluebirds, and robins were all
crossing the valley just at this point?

This question, too, I count it safer to ask than to answer, but all
observers, I am sure, must have remarked so much as this,--that birds,
even on their migrations, are subject to strong local preferences. An
ornithologist of the highest repute assures me that his own experience
has convinced him so strongly of this fact that if he shoots a rare
migrant in a certain spot he makes it a rule to visit the place again a
year afterward on the same day, and, if possible, at the same hour of
the day. Another friend sends me a very pretty story bearing upon the
same point. The bird of which he speaks, Wilson's black-cap warbler, is
one of the less common of our regular Massachusetts migrants. I count
myself fortunate if I see two or three specimens during its spring or
autumn passage. My correspondent shall tell the story for himself.

"While I was making the drawings for the 'Silva,' at the old Dwight
house, I was in the habit of taking a turn every pleasant day in the
gardens after my scanty lunch. On the 18th of May, 1887, in my daily
round I saw a Wilson's black-cap for the first time in my life. He was
in a bush of _Spiraea media_, which grew in the midst of the rockery, and
allowed me to examine him at near range with no appearance of fear.
Naturally I made a note of the occurrence in my diary, and talked about
it with my family when I got home. The seeing of a new bird always makes
a red-letter day.

"The next spring, as I was looking over my notebook of the previous
year, I came upon my entry of May 18th, and thought I would be on the
lookout for a black-cap on that date. Several times during the morning I
thought of the matter, and after my lunch I sauntered into the rockery
just as I had done the year before. Imagine my start when there, in the
very same bush, was the black-cap peering at me; and I found on looking
at my watch that it was precisely the same hour,--half past one! I
rubbed my eyes and pinched myself to make sure it was not a dream. No,
it was all real. Of course, I thought the coincidence very singular, and
talked about it, not only with my family, but also with other people.
You must remember that I had never seen the bird elsewhere.

"Well, another spring came round. The 18th of May was fixed in my mind,
and I thought many times of my black-cap (I called it _my_ black-cap
now), and wondered if it would keep tryst again. On the morning of the
18th, the first thing I thought of when I awoke was my black-cap. That
forenoon I actually felt nervous as the time approached, for I felt a
sort of certainty (you smile) that I should see my bird again. My lunch
was hastier than usual, and I was about to sally forth when it flashed
across me--'Suppose the bird should be there again, who would believe my
story? Hold! I will have a witness.' I called to Mr. J----, who was at
work upstairs, and after explaining what I wanted, invited him to
accompany me. We cautiously entered the rockery, and within a few
minutes there flitted from a neighboring thicket into that very Spiraea
bush my black-cap! I took out my watch. It was just half past one!"

My own experiences in this kind have been much less striking and
dramatic than the foregoing, but I may add that a few years ago I
witnessed the vernal migration in a new piece of country--ten miles or
so from my old field--and found myself at a very considerable
disadvantage. I had never realized till then how much accustomed I had
grown to look for particular birds in particular places, and not in
other places of a quite similar character.

I speak of witnessing a migration; but what we see for the most part
(ducks and geese being excepted) is not the actual movement northward
or southward. We see the stragglers, more or less numerous, that happen
to have dropped out of the procession in our immediate neighborhood,--a
flock of sandpipers about the edge of the pond, some sparrows by the
roadside, a bevy of warblers in the wood,--and from these signs we infer
the passing of the host.

Unlike swallows, robins, bluebirds, blackbirds, and perhaps most of the
sparrows, our smaller wood birds, the warblers and vireos especially,
appear to move as a general thing in mixed flocks. Whenever the woods
are full of them, as is the case now and then every spring and fall, one
of the most striking features of the show is the number of species
represented. For the benefit of readers who may never have observed such
a "bird wave," or "rush," let me sketch hastily one which occurred a few
years ago, on the 22d of September. As I started out at six o'clock in
the morning, in a cool northwest wind, birds were passing overhead in an
almost continuous stream, following a westerly course. They were chiefly
warblers, but I noted one fairly large flock of purple finches. All were
at a good height, and the whole movement had the air of a diurnal
migration. I could only conjecture that it was the end of the nocturnal
flight, so far, at least, as the warblers were concerned; in other
words, that the birds, on this particular occasion, did not finish their
nightly journey till a little after sunrise. But if many were still
flying, many others had already halted; for presently I came to a piece
of thin, stunted wood by the roadside, and found in it a highly
interesting company. Almost the first specimen I saw was a Connecticut
warbler perched in full view and exposing himself perfectly. Red-bellied
nuthatches were calling, and warblers uncounted were flitting about in
the trees and underbrush. A hurried search showed black-polls,
black-throated greens, blue yellow-backs, one redstart, one
black-and-white creeper, one Blackburnian, one black-and-yellow, one
Canadian flycatcher (singing lustily), one yellow redpoll, and one
clearly-marked bay-breast. The first yellow-bellied woodpecker of the
season was hammering in a tree over my head, and not far away was the
first flock of white-throated sparrows. After breakfast I passed the
place again, and the only bird to be found was one phoebe! Within
half a mile of the spot, however, I came upon at least three goodly
throngs, including scarlet tanagers (all in yellow and black),
black-throated blue warblers, pine warblers, olive-backed and
gray-cheeked thrushes, a flock of chewinks (made up exclusively of adult
males, so far as I could discover), red-eyed vireos, one solitary vireo,
brown thrashers, with more redstarts, a second Blackburnian, and a
second black-and-yellow. Every company had its complement of chickadees.
Of the morning's forty species, thirteen were warblers; and of these
thirteen, four were represented by one specimen each. For curiosity's
sake I may add that a much longer walk that afternoon, through the same
and other woods, was utterly barren. Except for two or three flocks of
white-throated sparrows; there was no sign whatever that the night
before had brought us a "flight."

Autumnal ornithology may almost be called a science by itself. Not only
are birds harder to find (being silent) and harder to recognize in
autumn than in spring, but their movements are in themselves more
difficult of observation. A few years of note-taking will put one in
possession of the approximate dates of arrival of all our common vernal
migrants. Every local observer will tell you when to look for each of
the familiar birds of his neighborhood; but he will not be half so ready
with information as to the time of the same birds' departure. Ask him
about a few of the commonest,--the least flycatcher and the oven-bird,
or the golden warbler and the Maryland yellow-throat. He will answer,
perhaps, that he has seen Maryland yellow-throats in early October, and
golden warblers in early September; but he will very likely add that
these were probably voyagers from the North, and that he has never made
out just when his own summer birds take their leave.

After the work of nidification is over, birds as a rule wander more or
less from their breeding haunts; and even if they do not wander they are
likely to become silent. If we miss them, therefore, we are not to
conclude as a matter of course that they have gone south. Last year,
during the early part of the season, cuckoos were unusually plentiful,
as it seemed to me. Then I discovered all at once that there were none
to be found. After the first of July I neither saw nor heard a cuckoo of
either species! Had they moved away? I do not know; but the case may be
taken as an extreme illustration of the uncertainty attaching to the
late-summer doings of birds in general. Every student must have had
experiences of a sort to make him slow to dogmatize when such points are
in question. Throughout May and June, for example, he has heard and seen
wood thrushes in a certain grove. After that, for a whole month, he
hears and sees nothing, though he is frequently there. The thrushes have
gone? So it would seem. But then, suddenly, they are singing again in
the very same trees, and he is forced to conclude that they have not
been away, but during their period of midsummer silence have eluded his
notice. On the whole, therefore, after making allowance for particular
cases in which we may have more precise information, it would be hard, I
think, to say just when our nocturnal travelers set out on their long
journey. As the poet prayed Life to do,--

        They steal away, give little warning,
        Choose their own time;
    Say not good-night,--but in May's brighter clime
        Bid us good-morning.

Their departure bereaves us, but, all in all, it must be accounted a
blessing. Like the falling of the leaves, it touches the heart with a
pleasing sadness,--a sadness more delicious, if one is born to enjoy it,
than all the merry-making of springtime. And even for the most
unsentimental of naturalists the autumnal season has many a delightful
hour. The year is almost done; but for the moment the whole feathered
world is in motion, and the shortest walk may show him the choicest of
rarities. Thanks to the passing of the birds, his local studies are an
endless pursuit. "It is now more than forty years that I have paid some
attention to the ornithology of this district, without being able to
exhaust the subject," says Gilbert White; "new occurrences still arise
as long as any inquiries are kept alive." A happy man is the bird-lover;
always another species to look for, another mystery to solve. His
expectations may never be realized; but no matter; it is the hope, not
its fulfillment, that makes life worth having. How can any New
Englander imagine that he has exhausted the possibilities of existence
so long as he has never seen the Lincoln finch and the Cape May warbler?

But "I speak as a fool." Our happiness, if we are bird-lovers indeed,
waits not upon novelties and rarities. All such exceptional bits of
private good fortune let the Fates send or withhold as they will. The
grand spectacle itself will not fail us. Even now, through all the
northern country, the procession is getting under way. For the next
three months it will be passing,--millions upon millions: warblers,
sparrows, thrushes, vireos, blackbirds, flycatchers, wrens, kinglets,
woodpeckers, swallows, humming-birds, hawks; with sandpipers, plovers,
ducks and geese, gulls, and who knows how many more? Night and day, week
days and Sundays, they will be flying: now singly or in little groups,
and flitting from one wood or pasture to another; now in great
companies, and with protracted all-day or all-night flights. Who could
ask a better stimulus for his imagination than the annual southing of
this mighty host? Each member of it knows his own time and his own
course. On such a day the snipe will be in such a meadow, and the golden
plover in such a field. Some, no doubt, will lose their way. Numbers
uncounted will perish by storm and flood; numbers more, alas, by human
agency. As I write, with the sad note of a bluebird in my ear, I can see
the sea-beaches and the marshes lined with guns. But the army will push
on; they will come to their desired haven; for there is a spirit in
birds, also, "and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them
understanding."




A GREAT BLUE HERON.

    "Why appear you with this ridiculous boldness?"
                                           SHAKESPEARE.


The watcher of birds in the bush soon discovers that they have
individual as well as race characteristics. They are not things, but
persons,--beings with intellect, affections, and will,--and a strong
specific resemblance is found to be consistent with no small measure of
personal variation. All robins, we say, look and act alike. But so do
all Yankees; yet it is part of every Yankee's birthright to be different
from every other Yankee. Nature abhors a copy, it would seem, almost as
badly as she abhors a vacuum. Perhaps, if the truth were known, a copy
_is_ a vacuum.

I walked down the bay shore of Cape Cod one summer morning, and at a
certain point climbed the steep cliff to the railway track, meaning to
look into a large cranberry meadow where, on previous visits, I had
found a few sandpipers and plovers. Near one end of the perfectly level,
sand-covered meadow was a little pool, and my first glance in that
direction showed me a great blue heron wading about its edge. With as
much quietness as possible I stole out of sight, and then hastened up
the railway through a cut, till I had the sun at my back and a hill
between me and the bird. Then I began a stealthy approach, keeping
behind one object after another, and finally going down flat upon the
ground (to roll in the soil is an excellent method of cleansing one's
garments on Cape Cod) and crawling up to a patch of bayberry bushes, the
last practicable cover.

Here let me say that the great blue heron is, as its name implies, a big
bird, standing almost as high as an ordinary man, and spreading its
wings for nearly or quite six feet. Its character for suspiciousness may
be gathered from what different writers have said about it. "He is most
jealously vigilant and watchful of man," says Wilson, "so that those who
wish to succeed in shooting the heron must approach him entirely unseen,
and by stratagem." "Extremely suspicious and shy," says Audubon.
"Unless under very favorable circumstances, it is almost hopeless to
attempt to approach it. To walk up towards one would be a fruitless
adventure." Dr. Brewer's language is to the same effect,--"At all times
very vigilant and difficult of approach."

This, then, was the bird which I now had under my field-glass, as I lay
at full length behind the friendly bayberry bushes. Up to this point,
for aught that appeared, he was quite unaware of my espionage. Like all
the members of his family that I have ever seen, he possessed so much
patience that it required much patience to watch him. For minutes
together he stood perfectly still, and his movements, as a rule, were
either so slow as to be all but imperceptible, or so rapid as almost to
elude the eye. Boys who have killed frogs--which was pretty certainly my
heron's present employment--will need no explanation of his behavior.
They know very well that, if the fatal club is to do its work, the
slowest kind of preliminary motion must be followed by something like a
flash of lightning.

I watched the bird for perhaps half an hour, admiring his handsome blue
wings as now and then he spread them, his dainty manner of lifting his
long legs, and the occasional flashing stroke of his beak. My range was
short (for a field-glass, I mean), and, all in all, I voted it "a fine
show."

When I wearied of my position I rose and advanced upon the heron in full
sight, expecting every moment to see him fly. To my astonishment he held
his ground. Down the hillside I went, nearer and nearer, till I came to
a barbed-wire fence, which bounded the cranberry field close by the
heron's pool. As I worried my way through this abominable obstruction,
he stepped into a narrow, shallow ditch and started slowly away. I made
rapidly after him, whereupon he got out of the ditch and strode on ahead
of me. By this time I was probably within twenty yards of him, so near
that, as he twisted his long neck every now and then, and looked at me
through his big yellow eyes, I began to wonder whether he might not take
it into his head to turn the tables upon me. A stab in the face with
that ugly sharp beak would have been no laughing matter; but I did not
believe myself in any danger, and quickened my steps, being now highly
curious to see how near the fellow I could get. At this he broke into a
kind of dog-trot, very comical to witness, and, if I had not previously
seen him fly a few yards, I should have supposed him disabled in the
wing. Dr. Brewer, by the way, says that this bird is "never known to
run, or even to walk briskly;" but such negative assertions are always
at the maker's risk.

He picked up his legs at last, for I pressed him closer and closer, till
there could not have been more than forty or fifty feet between us; but
even then he settled down again beside another pool, only a few rods
further on in the same meadow, and there I left him to pursue his
frog-hunt unmolested. The ludicrousness of the whole affair was enhanced
by the fact, already mentioned, that the ground was perfectly flat, and
absolutely without vegetation, except for the long rows of newly planted
cranberry vines. As to what could have influenced the bird to treat me
thus strangely, I have no means of guessing. As we say of each other's
freaks and oddities, it was _his way_, I suppose. He might have behaved
otherwise, of course, had I been armed; but of that I felt by no means
certain at the time, and my doubts were strengthened by an occurrence
which happened a month or so afterward.

I was crossing the beach at Nahant with a friend when we stole upon a
pair of golden plovers, birds that both of us were very happy to see.
The splendid old-gold spotting of their backs was plain enough; but
immature black-bellied plovers are adorned in a similar manner, and it
was necessary for us to see the rumps of our birds before we could be
sure of their identity. So, after we had scrutinized them as long as we
wished, I asked my companion to put them up while I should keep my glass
upon their backs and make certain of the color of their rumps as they
opened their wings. We were already within a very few paces of them, but
they ran before him as he advanced, and in the end he had almost to
tread on them.

The golden plover is not so unapproachable as the great blue heron, I
suppose, but from what sportsmen tell me about him I am confident that
he cannot be in the habit of allowing men to chase him along the beach
at a distance of five or six yards. And it is to be added that, in the
present instance, my companion had a gun in his hand.

Possibly all these birds would have behaved differently another day,
even in what to us might have seemed exactly the same circumstances.
Undoubtedly, too, it is easier, as an almost universal rule, to approach
one or two birds than a considerable flock. In the larger body there are
almost certain to be a few timorous souls,--a few wider-awake and better
instructed souls, let us rather say,--who by their outcries and hasty
flight will awaken all the others to a sense of possible danger. But it
is none the less true, as I said to begin with, that individual birds
have individual ways. And my great blue heron, I am persuaded, was a
"character." It would be worth something to know what was passing behind
those big yellow eyes as he twisted his neck to look once more at the
curious fellow--curious in two senses--who was keeping after him so
closely. Was the heron curious, as well as his pursuer? Or was he only a
little set in his own way; a little resentful of being imposed upon; a
little inclined to withstand the "tyrant of his fields," just for
principle's sake, as patriots ought to do? Or was he a young fellow, in
whom heredity had mysteriously omitted to load the bump of caution, and
upon whom experience had not yet enforced the lesson that if a creature
is taller and stronger than you are, it is prudent to assume that he
will most likely think it a pleasant bit of sport to kill you? It is
nothing to the credit of humankind that the sight of an unsuspicious
bird in a marsh or on the beach should have become a subject for
wonder.




FLOWERS AND FOLKS.

    "To know one element, explore another,
     And in the second reappears the first."
                                    EMERSON.


Every order of intelligent beings naturally separates the world into two
classes,--itself and the remainder. Birds, for instance, have no doubt a
feeling, more or less clearly defined, which, if it were translated into
human speech, might read, "Birds and nature." We, in our turn, say, "Man
and nature." But such distinctions, useful as they are, and therefore
admissible, are none the less arbitrary and liable to mislead. Birds and
men are alike parts of nature, having many things in common not only
with each other, but with every form of animate existence. The world is
not a patchwork, though never so cunningly put together, but a garment
woven throughout.

The importance of this truth, its far-reaching and many-sided
significance, is even yet only beginning to be understood; but its
bearing upon the study of what we call natural history would seem to be
evident. My own experience as a dabbler in botany and ornithology has
convinced me that the pursuit of such researches is not at all out of
the spirit of the familiar line,--

    "The proper study of mankind is man,"--

whatever the author of the line may have himself intended by his
apothegm. To become acquainted with the peculiarities of plants or birds
is to increase one's knowledge of beings of his own sort.

There is room, I think, for a treatise on analogical botany,--a study of
the human nature of plants. Thoroughly and sympathetically done, the
work would be both surprising and edifying. It would give us a better
opinion of plants, and possibly a poorer opinion of ourselves. Some
wholesome first lessons of this kind we have all taken, as a matter of
course. "We all do fade as a leaf." "All flesh is grass, and all the
goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field." There are no
household words more familiar than such texts. But the work of which I
am thinking will deal not so much with our likeness to tree and herb as
with the likeness of tree and herb to us; and furthermore, it will go
into the whole subject, systematically and at length. Meanwhile, it is
open even to an amateur to offer something, in a general and discursive
way, upon so inviting a theme, and especially to call attention to its
scope and variety.

As I sit at my desk, the thistles are in their glory, and in a vase at
my elbow stands a single head of the tall swamp variety, along with a
handful of fringed gentians. Forgetting what it is, one cannot help
pronouncing the thistle beautiful,--a close bunch of minute rose-purple
flowers. But who could ever feel toward it as toward the gentian? Beauty
is a thing not merely of form and color, but of memory and association.
The thistle is an ugly customer. In a single respect it lays itself out
to be agreeable; but even its beauty is too much like that of some
venomous reptile. Yet it has its friends, or, at all events, its patrons
(if you wish to catch butterflies, go to the thistle pasture), and no
doubt could give forty eloquent and logical excuses for its offensive
traits. Probably it felicitates itself upon its shrewdness, and pities
the poor estate of its defenseless neighbors. How they must envy its
happier fortune! It sees them browsed upon by the cattle, and can hardly
be blamed if it chuckles a little to itself as the greedy creatures pass
it by untouched. School-girls and botanists break down the golden-rods
and asters, and pull up the gerardias and ladies'-tresses; but neither
school-girl nor collector often troubles the thistle. It opens its
gorgeous blossoms and ripens its feathery fruit unmolested. Truly it is
a great thing to wear an armor of prickles!

"The human nature of plants,"--have I any reader so innocent as not to
feel at this moment the appropriateness of the phrase? Can there be one
so favored as not to have some unmistakable thistles among his Christian
townsmen and acquaintance? Nay, we all know them. They are the more
easily discovered for standing always a little by themselves. They
escape many slight inconveniences under which more amiable people
suffer. Whoever finds himself in a hard place goes not to them for
assistance. They are recognized afar as persons to be let alone. Yet
they, too, like their floral representatives, have a good side. If they
do not give help, they seldom ask it. Once a year they may actually "do
a handsome thing," as the common expression is; but they cannot put off
their own nature; their very generosity pricks the hand that receives
it, and when old Time cuts them down with his scythe (what should we do
without this famous husbandman, unkindly as we talk of him?) there will
be no great mourning.

Is it then an unpardonable misdemeanor for a plant to defend itself
against attack and extermination? Has the duty of non-resistance no
exceptions nor abatements in the vegetable kingdom? That would be indeed
a hard saying; for what would become of our universal favorite, the
rose? On this point there may be room for a diversity of opinion; but
for one, I cannot wish the wild rose disarmed, lest, through the
recklessness of its admirers, what is now one of the commonest of our
wayside ornaments should grow to be a rarity. I esteem the rose a
patrician, and fairly entitled to patrician manners. As every one sees,
people in high station, especially if they chance to possess attractive
social qualities, are of necessity compelled to discountenance
everything like careless familiarity, even from those with whom they may
formerly have been most intimate. They must always stand more or less
upon ceremony, and never be handled without gloves. So it is with the
queen of flowers. Its thorns not only serve it as a protection, but are
for its admirers an excellent discipline in forbearance. They make it
easier for us, as Emerson says, to "love the wood rose and leave it on
the stalk." In addition to which I am moved to say that the rose, like
the holly, illustrates a truth too seldom insisted upon; namely, that
people are more justly condemned for the absence of all good qualities
than for the presence of one or two bad ones.

Some such plea as this, though with a smaller measure of assurance, I
should make in behalf of plants like the barberry and the bramble. The
latter, in truth, sometimes acts as if it were not so much fighting us
off as drawing us on. Leaning far forward and stretching forth its arms,
it buttonholes the wayfarer, so to speak, and with generous country
insistence forces upon him the delicious clusters which he, in his
preoccupation, seemed in danger of passing untasted. I think I know the
human counterparts of both barberry and bramble,--excellent people in
their place, though not to be chosen for bosom friends without a careful
weighing of consequences. Judging them not by their manners, but by
their fruits, we must set them on the right hand. It would go hard with
some of the most pious of my neighbors, I imagine, if the presence of a
few thorns and prickles were reckoned inconsistent with a moderately
good character.

As for reprobates like the so-called "poison ivy" and "poison dogwood,"
they have perhaps borrowed a familiar human maxim,--"All is fair in
war." In any case, they are no worse than savage heathen, who kill their
enemies with poisoned arrows, or than civilized Christians, who stab the
reputation of their friends with poisoned words. Their marked comeliness
of habit may be taken as a point in their favor; or, on the contrary, it
may be held to make their case only so much the blacker, by laying them
liable to the additional charge of hypocrisy. The question is a nice
one, and I gladly leave it for subtler casuists than I to settle.

How refreshing to turn from all these, from the thistle and the bramble,
yea, even from the rose itself, to gentle spirits like the violet and
anemone, the arbutus and hepatica! These wage no war. They are of the
original Society of Friends. Who will may spoil them without hurt. Their
defense is with their Maker. I wonder whether anybody ever thinks of
such flowers as representative of any order of grown people, or whether
to everybody else they are forever children, as I find, on thinking of
it, they have always been to me. Lowly and trustful, sweet and frail,
"of such is the kingdom of heaven." They pass away without losing their
innocence. Ere the first heats of summer they are gone.

Yet the autumn, too, has its delicate blooms, though they are
overshadowed and, as it were, put out of countenance by the coarser
growths which must be said to characterize the harvest season. Nothing
that May puts into her lap is more exquisite than are the purple
gerardias with which August and September embroider the pasture and the
woodland road. They have not the sweet breath of the arbutus, nor even
the faint elusive odor of the violet, but for daintiness of form,
perfection of color, and gracefulness of habit it would be impossible to
praise them too highly. Of our three species, my own favorite is the one
of the narrow leaves (_Gerardia tenuifolia_), its longer and slighter
flower-stems giving it an airiness and grace peculiarly its own. A lady
to whom I had brought a handful the other day expressed it well when she
said, "They look like fairy flowers." They are of my mind in this: they
love a dry, sunny opening in the woods, or a grassy field on the edge of
woods, especially if there be a seldom-used path running through it. I
know not with what human beings to compare them. Perhaps their antitypes
of our own kind are yet to be evolved. But I have before now seen a
woman who might worthily be set in their company,--a person whose sweet
and wise actions were so gracefully carried and so easily let fall as to
suggest an order and quality of goodness quite out of relation to common
flesh and blood.

What a contrast between such lowly-minded, unobtrusive beauties and
egotists like our multitudinous asters and golden-rods! These, between
them, almost take possession of the world for the two or three months of
their reign. They are handsome, and they know it. What is beauty for, if
not to be admired? They mass their tiny blossoms first into solid heads,
then into panicles and racemes, and have no idea of hiding their
constellated brightness under a bushel. "Let your light shine!" is the
word they go on. How eagerly they crowd along the roadside, till the
casual passer-by can see scarce anything else! If he does not see
_them_, it is not their fault.

For myself, I am far from wishing them at all less numerous, or a jot
less forward in displaying their charms. Let there be variety, I say.
Because I speak well of the violet for its humility, I see no reason why
I should quarrel with the aster for loving to make a show. Herein, too,
plants are like men. An indisposition toward publicity is amiable in
those to whom it is natural; but I am not clear that bashfulness is the
only commendable quality. Let plants and men alike carry themselves
according to their birthright. Providence has not ordained a diversity
of gifts for nothing, and it is only a narrow philosophy that takes
offense at seeming contrarieties. The truer method, and the happier as
well, is to like each according to its kind: to love that which is
amiable, to admire that which is admirable, and to study that which is
curious.

A few weeks ago, for example, I walked again up the mountain road that
climbs out of the Franconia Valley into the Franconia Notch. I had left
home twenty-four hours before, fresh from working upon the asters and
golden-rods (trying to straighten out my local catalogue in accordance
with Dr. Gray's more recent classification of these large and difficult
genera), and naturally enough had asters and golden-rods still in my
eye. The first mile or two afforded nothing of particular note, but by
and by I came to a cluster of the sturdy and peculiar _Solidago
squarrosa_, and was taking an admiring account of its appearance and
manner of growth, when I caught sight of some lower blue flower
underneath, which on a second glance proved to be the closed gentian.
This grew in hiding, as one might say, in the shadow of its taller and
showier neighbors. Not far off, but a little more within the wood, were
patches of the linnaea, which had been at its prettiest in June, but even
now, in late September, was still putting forth scattered blossoms. What
should a man do? Discard the golden-rod for the gentian, and in turn
forsake the gentian for the twin-flower? Nay, a child might do that, but
not a man; for the three were all beautiful and all interesting, and
each the more beautiful and interesting for its unlikeness to the
others. If one wishes a stiff lesson in classification, there are few
harder genera (among flowering plants) than _Solidago_; if he would
investigate the timely and taking question of the dependence of plants
upon insects, this humble "proterandrous" gentian (which to human vision
seems closed, but which the humble-bee knows well how to enter) offers
him a favorable subject; while if he has an eye for beauty, a nose for
delicate fragrance, and a soul for poetry, the linnaea will never cease
to be one of his prime favorites. So I say again, let us have variety.
It would be a stupid town all whose inhabitants should be of identical
tastes and habits, though these were of the very best; and it would be a
tiresome country that brought forth only a single kind of plants.

The flower of Linnaeus is a flower by itself, as here and there appears a
man who seems, as we say, _sui generis_. This familiar phrase, by the
bye, is literally applicable to _Linnaea borealis_, a plant that spreads
over a large part of the northern hemisphere, but everywhere preserves
its own specific character; so that, whether it be found in Greenland or
in Maryland, on the Alaskan Islands or in Utah, in Siberia or on the
mountains of Scotland, it is always and everywhere the same,--a genus of
one species. Diversities of soil and climate make no impression upon its
originality. If it live at all, it must live according to its own plan.

The aster, on the contrary, has a special talent for variation. Like
some individuals of another sort, it is born to adapt itself to
circumstances. Dr. Gray enumerates no less than one hundred and
ninety-six North American species and varieties, many of which shade
into each other with such endless and well-nigh insensible gradations
that even our great special student of the _Compositae_ pronounces the
accurate and final classification of this particular genus a labor
beyond his powers. What shall we say of this habit of variability? Is it
a mark of strength or of weakness? Which is nobler,--to be true to one's
ideal in spite of circumstances, or to conquer circumstances by suiting
one's self to them? Who shall decide? Enough that the twin-flower and
the star-flower each obeys its own law, and in so doing contributes each
its own part toward making this world the place of diversified beauty
which it was foreordained to be.

I spoke of the linnaea's autumnal blossoms, though its normal flowering
time is in June. Even this steady-going, unimpressible citizen of the
world, it appears, has its one bit of freakishness. In these bright,
summery September days, when the trees put on their glory, this lowliest
member of the honeysuckle family feels a stirring within to make itself
beautiful; and being an evergreen (instead of a summer-green), and
therefore incapable of bedecking itself after the maple's manner, it
sends up a few flower-stems, each with its couple of swinging, fragrant
bells. So it bids the world good-by till the long winter once more comes
and goes.

The same engaging habit is noticeable in the case of some of our very
commonest plants. After the golden-rods and asters have had their day,
late in October or well into November, when witch-hazel, yarrow, and
clover are almost the only blossoms left us, you will stumble here and
there upon a solitary dandelion reflecting the sun, or a violet giving
back the color of the sky. And even so, you may find, once in a while,
an old man in whom imaginative impulses have sprung up anew, now that
all the prosaic activities of middle life are over. It is almost as if
he were born again. The song of the April robin, the blossoming of the
apple-tree, the splendors of sunset and sunrise,--these and things like
them touch him to pleasure, as he now remembers they used to do years
and years ago. What means this strange revival of youth in age? Is it a
reminiscence merely, a final flickering of the candle, or is it rather a
prophecy of life yet to come? Well, with the dandelion and the violet we
know with reasonable certainty how the matter stands. The autumnal
blooms are not belated, but precocious; they belong not to the season
past, but to the season coming. Who shall forbid us to hope that what is
true of the violet will prove true also of the man?

It speaks well for human nature that in the long run the lowliest
flowers are not only the best loved, but the oftenest spoken of. Men
play the cynic: modest merit goes to the wall, they say; whoever would
succeed, let him put on a brazen face and sharpen his elbows. But those
who talk in this strain deceive neither themselves nor those who listen
to them. They are commonly such as have themselves tried the trumpet and
elbow method, and have discovered that, whatever may be true of
transient notoriety, neither public fame nor private regard is to be won
by such means. We do not retract what we have said in praise of
diversity, and about the right of each to live according to its own
nature, but we gladly perceive that in the case of the flowers also it
is the meek that inherit the earth.

Our appreciation of our fellow-men depends in part upon the amount, but
still more upon the quality, of the service they render us. We could
get along without poets more comfortably than without cobblers, for the
lower use is often first, in order both of time and of necessity; but we
are never in doubt as to their relative place in our esteem. One serves
the body, the other the soul; and we reward the one with money, the
other with affection and reverence. And our estimation of plants is
according to the same rule. Such of them as nourish the body are
good,--good even to the point of being indispensable; but as we make a
difference between the barnyard fowl and the nightingale, and between
the common run of humanity and a Beethoven or a Milton, so maize and
potatoes are never put into the same category with lilies and violets.
It must be so, because man is more than an animal, and "the life is more
than meat."

Again we say, let each fulfill its own function. One is made for
utility, another for beauty. For plants, too, are specialists. They know
as well as men how to make the most of inherited capacities and
aptitudes, achieving distinction at last by the simple process of
sticking to one thing, whether that be the production of buds,
blossoms, berries, leaves, bark, timber, or what not; and our judgment
of them must be correspondingly varied. The vine bears blossoms, but is
to be rated not by them, but by the grapes that come after them; and the
rose-tree bears hips, but takes its rank not from them, but from the
flowers that went to the making of them. "Nothing but leaves" is a
verdict unfavorable or otherwise according to its application. The
tea-shrub would hold up its head to hear it.

One of the most interesting and suggestive points of difference among
plants is that which relates to the matter of self-reliance. Some are
made to stand alone, others to twine, and others to creep. If it were
allowable to attribute human feelings to them, we should perhaps be safe
in assuming that the upright look down upon the climbers, and the
climbers in turn upon the creepers; for who of us does not felicitate
himself upon his independence, such as it is, or such as he imagines it
to be? But if independence is indeed a boon,--and I, for one, am too
thoroughbred a New Englander ever to doubt it,--it is not the only good,
nor even the highest. The nettle, standing straight and prim, asking no
favors of anybody, may rail at the grape-vine, which must lay hold of
something, small matter what, by which to steady itself; but the nettle
might well be willing to forego somewhat of its self-sufficiency, if by
so doing it could bring forth grapes. The smilax, also, with its thorns,
its pugnacious habit, and its stony, juiceless berries, a sort of
handsome vixen among vines,--the smilax, which can climb though it
cannot stand erect, has little occasion to lord it over the strawberry.
If one has done nothing, or worse than nothing, it is hardly worth while
to boast of the original fashion in which he has gone about it.
Moreover, the very plants of which we are speaking bear witness to the
fact that it is possible to accept help, and still retain to the full
one's own individuality. The strawberry is no more a plagiarist than the
smilax, nor the grape than the nettle. If the vine clings to the cedar,
the connection is but mechanical. Its spirit and life are as independent
of the savin as of the planet Jupiter. Even the dodder, which not only
twines about other weeds, but actually sucks its life from them, does
not thereby lose an iota of its native character. If a man is only
original to begin with,--so the parable seems to run,--he is under a
kind of necessity to remain so (as Shakespeare did), no matter how much
help he may draw from alien sources.

This truth of the vegetable world is the more noteworthy, because, along
with it there goes a very strong and persistent habit of individual
variation. The plant is faithful to the spirit of its inherited law, but
is not in bondage to the letter. Our "high-bush blackberries," to take a
familiar illustration, are all of one species, but it does not follow
that they are all exactly alike. So far from it, I knew in my time--and
the school-boys of the present day are not less accurately informed, we
may presume--where to find berries of all shapes, sizes, and flavors.
Some were sour, and some were bitter, and some (I can taste them yet)
were finger-shaped and sweet. And what is true of _Rubus villosus_ is
probably true of all plants, though in varying degrees. I do not recall
a single article of our annual wild crop--blueberries, huckleberries,
blackberries, cherries, grapes, pig-nuts (a bad name for a good thing),
shagbarks, acorns, and so forth--in which there was not this constant
inequality among plants of the same species, perfectly well defined, and
never lost sight of by us juvenile connoisseurs. If we failed to find
the same true of other vines and bushes, which for our purposes bore
blossoms only, the explanation is not far to seek. Our perceptions,
aesthetic and gastronomic, were unequally developed. We were in the case
of the man to whom a poet is a poet, though he knows very well that
there are cooks and cooks.

It is this slight but everywhere present admixture of the personal
quality--call it individuality, or what you will--that saves the world,
animal and vegetable alike, from stagnation. Every bush, every bird,
every man, together with its unmistakable and ineradicable likeness to
the parent stock, has received also a something, be it more or less,
that distinguishes it from all its fellows. Let our observation be
delicate enough, and we shall perceive that there are no duplicates of
any kind, the world over. It is part of the very unity of the world,
this universally diffused diversity.

It does a sympathetic observer good to see how humanly plants differ in
their likes and dislikes. One is catholic: as common people say, it is
not particular; it can live and thrive almost anywhere. Another must
have precisely such and such conditions, and is to be found, therefore,
only in very restricted localities. The _Dionaea_, or Venus's fly-trap,
is a famous example of this fastidiousness, growing in a small district
of North Carolina, and, as far as appears, nowhere else,--a highly
specialized plant, with no generic relative. Another instance is
furnished by a water lily (_Nymphaea elegans_), the rediscovery of which
is chronicled in a late issue of one of our botanical journals.[17]
"This lily was originally found in 1849, and has never been seen since,
holding its place in botanical literature for these almost forty years
on the strength of a single collection at a single vaguely described
station on the broad prairies of southwestern Texas;" now, after all
this time, it turns up again in another quarter of the same State. And
every student could report cases of a similar character, though less
striking than these, of course, within the limits of his own local
researches. If you ask me where I find dandelions, I answer, anywhere;
but if you wish me to show you the sweet colt's-foot (_Nardosmia
palmata_), you must go with me to one particular spot. Any of my
neighbors will tell you where the pink moccasin flower grows; but if it
is the yellow one you are in search of, I shall swear you to secrecy
before conducting you to its swampy hiding-place. Some plants, like some
people (but the plants, be it noted, are mostly weeds), seem to flourish
best away from home; others die under the most careful transplanting.
Some are lovers of the open, and cannot be too much in the sun; others
lurk in deep woods, under the triple shadow of tree and bush and fern.
Some take to sandy hill-tops; others must stand knee-deep in water. One
insists upon the richest of meadow loam; another is content with the
face of a rock. We may say of them as truly as of ourselves, _De
gustibus non est disputandum_. Otherwise, how would the earth ever be
clothed with verdure?

[17] The _Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club_ for January, 1888, page
13.

But plants are subject to other whims not less pronounced than these
which have to do with the choice of a dwelling-place. We may call it the
general rule that leaves come before flowers; but how many of our trees
and shrubs reverse this order! The singular habit of the witch-hazel,
whose blossoms open as the leaves fall, may be presumed to be familiar
to all readers; and hardly less curious is the freak of the chestnut,
which, almost if not quite alone among our amentaceous trees, does not
put on its splendid coronation robes till late in June, and is
frequently at the height of its magnificence in mid-July. What a pretty
piece of variety have we, again, in the diurnal and the nocturnal
bloomers! For my own part, being a watcher of birds, and therefore
almost of necessity an early stirrer abroad, I profess a special regard
for such plants as save their beauty for night-time and cloudy weather.
The evening primrose is no favorite with most people, I take it, but I
seldom fail to pick a blossom or two with the dew on them. Those to whom
I carry them usually exclaim as over some wonderful exotic, though the
primrose is an inveterate haunter of the roadside. Yet its blossoms
have only to be looked at and smelled of to make their way, homely as is
the stalk that produces them. They love darkness rather than light, but
it certainly is not "because their deeds are evil." One might as well
cast the opprobrious text in the face of the moon and stars. Now and
then some enterprising journalist, for want of better employment,
investigates anew the habits of literary workers; and it invariably
transpires that some can do their best only by daylight, while the minds
of others seem to be good for nothing till the sun goes down; and the
wise reader, who reads not so much to gain information as to see whether
the writer tells the truth, shakes his head, and says, "Oh, it is all in
use." Of course it is all in use, just as it is with whippoorwills and
the morning-glory.

The mention of the evening primrose calls for the further remark that
plants, not less than ourselves, have a trick of combining opposite
qualities,--a coarse-grained and scraggy habit, for instance, with
blossoms of exquisite fragrance and beauty. The most gorgeous flowers
sometimes exhale an abominable odor, and it is not unheard of that
inconspicuous or even downright homely sorts should be accounted
precious for their sweetness; while, as everybody knows, few members of
our native flora are more graceful in appearance than the very two whose
simple touch is poison. Could anything be more characteristic of human
nature than just such inconsistencies? Suavity and trickery, harshness
and integrity, a fiery temper and a gentle heart,--how often do we see
the good and the bad dwelling together! We would have ordered things
differently, I dare say, had they been left to us,--the good should have
been all good, and the bad all bad; and yet, if it be a grief to feel
that the holiest men have their failings, it ought perhaps to be a
consolation, rather than an additional sorrow, to perceive that the most
vicious are not without their virtues. Beyond which, shall we presume to
suggest that as poisons have their use, so moral evil, give it time
enough, may turn out to be not altogether a curse?

I have treated my subject too fancifully, I fear. Indeed, there comes
over me at this moment a sudden suspicion that my subject itself is
nothing but a fancy, or, worse yet, a profanation. If the flowers could
talk, who knows how earnestly they might deprecate all such misguided
attempts at doing them honor,--as if it were anything but a slander,
this imputation to them of the foibles, or even the self-styled good
qualities, of our poor humanity! What an egoist is man! I seem to hear
them saying; look where he will, at the world or at its Creator, he sees
nothing but the reflection of his own image.




IN PRAISE OF THE WEYMOUTH PINE.

    "I seek in the motion of the forest, in the sound of the
     pines, some accents of the eternal language."
                                                  SENANCOUR.


I could never think it surprising that the ancients worshiped trees;
that groves were believed to be the dwelling places of the gods; that
Xerxes delighted in the great plane-tree of Lydia; that he decked it
with golden ornaments and appointed for it a sentry, one of "the
immortal ten thousand." Feelings of this kind are natural; among natural
men they seem to have been well-nigh universal. The wonder is that any
should be without them. For myself, I cannot recollect the day when I
did not regard the Weymouth pine (the white pine I was taught to call
it, but now, for reasons of my own, I prefer the English name) with
something like reverence. Especially was this true of one,--a tree of
stupendous girth and height, under which I played, and up which I
climbed till my cap seemed almost to rub against the sky. That pine
ought to be standing yet; I would go far to lie in its shadow. But alas!
no village Xerxes concerned himself for its safety, and long, long ago
it was brought to earth, it and all its fair lesser companions. There is
no wisdom in the grave, and it is nothing to them now that I remember
them so kindly. Some of them went to the making of boxes, I suppose,
some to the kindling of kitchen fires. In like noble spirit did the
illustrious Bobo, for the love of roast pig, burn down his father's
house.

No such pines are to be seen now. I have said it for these twenty years,
and mean no offense, surely, to the one under which, in thankful mood, I
happen at this moment to be reclining. Yet a murmur runs through its
branches as I pencil the words. Perhaps it is saying to itself that
giants are, and always have been, things of the past,--things gazed at
over the beholder's shoulder and through the mists of years; and that
this venerable monarch of my boyhood, this relic of times remote, has
probably grown faster since it was cut down than ever it did while
standing. I care not to argue the point. Rather, let me be glad that a
tree is a tree, whether large or small. What a wonder of wonders it
would seem to unaccustomed eyes! As some lover of imaginative delights
wished that he could forget Shakespeare and read him new, so I would
cheerfully lose all memory of my king of Weymouth pines, if by that
means I might for once look upon a tree as upon something I had never
seen or dreamed of.

For that purpose, were it given me to choose, I would have one that had
grown by itself; full of branches on all sides, but with no suggestion
of primness; in short, a perfect tree, a miracle hardly to be found in
any forest, since the forest would be no better than a park if the
separate members of it were allowed room to develop each after its own
law. Nature is too cunning an artist to spoil the total effect of her
picture by too fond a regard for the beauty of particular details.

I once passed a lazy, dreamy afternoon in a small clearing on a Canadian
mountain-side, where the lumbermen had left standing a few scattered
butternuts. I can see them now,--misshapen giants, patriarchal
monstrosities, their huge trunks leaning awkwardly this way and that,
and each bearing at the top a ludicrously small, one-sided bunch of
leafy boughs. All about me was the ancient wood. For a week I had been
wandering through it with delight. Such beeches and maples, birches and
butternuts! I had not thought of any imperfection. I had been in
sympathy with the artist, and had enjoyed his work in the same spirit in
which it had been wrought. Now, however, with these unhappy butternuts
in my eye, I began to look, not at the forest, but at the trees, and I
found that the spared butternuts were in no sense exceptional. _All_ the
trees were deformed. They had grown as they could, not as their innate
proclivities would have led them. A tree is no better than a man; it
cannot be itself if it stands too much in a crowd.

I set it down, unwillingly, to the discredit of the Weymouth pine,--a
symptom of some ancestral taint, perhaps,--that it suffers less than
most trees from being thus encroached upon. Yet it does not entirely
escape. True, it leans neither to left nor right, its trunk is seldom
contorted; if it grow at all it must grow straight toward the zenith;
but it is sadly maimed, nevertheless,--hardly more than a tall stick
with a broom at the top. If you would see a typical white pine you must
go elsewhere to look for it. I remember one such, standing by itself in
a broad Concord River meadow; not remarkable for its size, but of a
symmetry and beauty that make the traveler turn again and again, till he
is a mile away, to gaze upon it. No pine-tree ever grew like that in a
wood.

I go sometimes through a certain hamlet, which has sprung suddenly into
being on a hill-top where formerly stood a pine grove. The builders of
the houses have preserved (doubtless they use that word) a goodly number
of the trees. But though I have been wont to esteem the poorest tree as
better than none, I am almost ready to forswear my opinion at sight of
these slender trunks, so ungainly and unsupported. The first breeze, one
would say, must bring them down upon the roofs they were never meant to
shade. Poor naked things! I fancy they look abashed at being dragged
thus unexpectedly and inappropriately into broad daylight. If I were to
see the householder lifting his axe against one of them I think I should
not say, "Woodman, spare _that_ tree!" Let it go to the fire, the sooner
the better, and be out of its misery.

Not that I blame the tree, or the power that made it what it is. The
forest, like every other community, prospers--we may rather say
exists--at the expense of individual perfection. But the expense is true
economy, for, however it may be in ethics, in aesthetics the end
justifies the means. The solitary pine, unhindered, symmetrical, green
to its lowermost twig, as it rises out of the meadow or stands a-tiptoe
on the rocky ledge, is a thing of beauty, a pleasure to every eye. A
pity and a shame that it should not be more common! But the pine
_forest_, dark, spacious, slumberous, musical! Here is something better
than beauty, dearer than pleasure. When we enter this cathedral, unless
we enter it unworthily, we speak not of such things. Every tree may be
imperfect, with half its branches dead for want of room or want of sun,
but until the devotee turns critic--an easy step, alas, for
half-hearted worshipers--we are conscious of no lack. Magnificence can
do without prettiness, and a touch of solemnity is better than any
amusement.

Where shall we hear better preaching, more searching comment upon life
and death, than in this same cathedral? Verily, the pine is a priest of
the true religion. It speaks never of itself, never its own words.
Silent it stands till the Spirit breathes upon it. Then all its
innumerable leaves awake and speak as they are moved. Then "he that hath
ears to hear, let him hear." Wonderful is human speech,--the work of
generations upon generations, each striving to express itself, its
feelings, its thoughts, its needs, its sufferings, its joys, its
inexpressible desires. Wonderful is human speech, for its complexity,
its delicacy, its power. But the pine-tree, under the visitations of the
heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of
things we have never said and never can say,--things that lie deeper
than words, deeper than thought. Blessed are our ears if we hear, for
the message is not to be understood by every comer, nor, indeed, by
any, except at happy moments. In this temple all hearing is given by
inspiration, for which reason the pine-tree's language is inarticulate,
as Jesus spake in parables.

The pine wood loves a clean floor, and is intolerant of undergrowth.
Grasses and sedges, with all bushes, it frowns upon, as a model
housekeeper frowns upon dirt. A plain brown carpet suits it best, with a
modest figure of green--preferably of evergreen--woven into it; a
tracery of partridge-berry vine, or, it may be, of club moss, with here
and there a tuft of pipsissewa and pyrola. Its mood is sombre, its taste
severe. Yet I please myself with noticing that the pine wood, like the
rest of us, is not without its freak, its amiable inconsistency, its one
"tender spot," as we say of each other. It makes a pet of one of our
oddest, brightest, and showiest flowers, the pink lady's-slipper, and by
some means or other has enticed it away from the peat bog, where it
surely should be growing, along with the calopogon, the pogonia, and the
arethusa, and here it is, like some rare exotic, thriving in a bed of
sand and on a mat of brown needles. Who will undertake to explain the
occult "elective affinity" by which this rosy orchid is made so much at
home under the heavy shadow of the Weymouth pine?

According to the common saying, there is no accounting for tastes. If by
this is meant simply that _we_ cannot account for them, the statement is
true enough. But if we are to speak exactly, there are no likes nor
dislikes except for cause. Every freak of taste, like every vagary of
opinion, has its origin and history, and, with sufficient knowledge on
our part, could be explained and justified. The pine-tree and the orchid
are not friends by accident, however the case may look to us who cannot
see behind the present nor beneath the surface. There are no mysteries
_per se_, but only to the ignorant. Yet ignorance itself, disparagingly
as we talk of it, has its favorable side,--as it is pleasant sometimes
to withdraw from the sun and wander for a season in the half-light of
the forest. Perhaps we need be in no haste to reach a world where there
is never any darkness. In some moods, at least, I go with the
partridge-berry vine and the lady's-slipper. It is good, I think, to
live awhile longer in the shadow; to see as through a glass darkly; and
to hear overhead, not plain words, but inarticulate murmurs.

I am not to be understood as praising the pine at the expense of other
trees. All things considered, no evergreen can be equal to a
summer-green, on which we see the leaves budding, unfolding, ripening,
and falling,--a "worlde whiche neweth everie daie." What would winter be
worth without the naked branches of maples and elms, beeches and oaks?
We speak of them sadly:

    "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

But the sadness is of a pleasing sort, that could ill be spared by any
who know the pleasures of sentiment and sober reflection. But though one
tree differeth from another tree in glory, we may surely rejoice in them
all. One ministers to our mood to-day, another to-morrow.

    "I hate those trees that never lose their foliage;
     They seem to have no sympathy with Nature;
     Winter and summer are alike to them."

So says Ternissa, in Landor's dialogue. I know what she means. But I do
not "hate" an impassive, unchangeable temper, whether in a tree or in a
man. I have so little of such a spirit myself that I am glad to see
some tokens of it--not too frequent, indeed, nor too self-assertive--in
the world about me. And so I say, let me never be, for any long time
together, where there are no Weymouth pines at which I may gaze from
afar, or under which I may lie and listen. They boast not (rare
stoics!), but they set us a brave example. No "blasts that blow the
poplar white" can cause the pine-tree to blanch. No frost has power to
strip it of a single leaf. Its wood is soft, but how dauntless its
spirit!--a truly encouraging paradox, lending itself, at our private
need, to endless consolatory moralizings. The great majority of my
brothers must be comforted, I think, by any fresh reminder that the
battle is not to the strong.

For myself, then, like the lowly partridge-berry vine, I would be always
the pine-tree's neighbor. Who knows but by lifelong fellowship with it I
may absorb something of its virtue? Summer and winter, its fragrant
breath rises to heaven; and of it we may say, with more truth than
Landor said of the over-sweet fragrance of the linden, "Happy the man
whose aspirations are pure enough to mingle with it!"




  INDEX.


  Asters, 62, 214, 217.

  Autumnal flowers, 212.

  Autumnal ornithology, 191.


  Bearberry, 72, 78.

  Bittern, 71.

  Blackberry, 63, 210, 224.

  Bluebird, 179, 184, 185.

  Butterflies:--
    in November, 36.
    on Mt. Mansfield, 104.


  Catbird, 176.

  Cedar-bird, 33.

  Chestnut-tree, 228.

  Chewink, 191.

  Chickadee, 49, 55.

  Cowbird, 83.

  Creeper:--
    black-and-white, 85.
    brown, 49.

  Crossbill, white-winged, 27.

  Cuckoo, 192.


  Dandelion, 219.

  December birds, 54.

  December flowers, 60.

  Diapensia, 23, 25, 30.

  Dodder, 223.


  Evening primrose, 228.


  Flicker, 53, 69.

  Flowers:--
    in November, 36.
    in December, 60.
    on Cape Cod, 80.
    on Mt. Lafayette, 22, 25.
    on Mt. Mansfield, 103.

  Flycatcher:--
    great-crested, 9.
    least, 9.
    olive-sided, 9, 10.
    phoebe, 9, 10, 179.
    Traill's, 9.
    yellow-bellied, 9.

  Golden Aster, 80.

  Golden-rods, 81, 214, 215.

  Goldfinch, 177.

  Grass Finch (Vesper Sparrow), 5, 110.

  Greenland Sandwort, 23, 25, 31, 103.

  Groundsel, 61.


  Habenaria dilatata, 103.

  Heron, great blue, 197.

  Holy-Grass, 25.

  Humming-bird:--
    Rivoli, 139.
    ruby-throated, 111, 135.

  Hyla Pickeringii, 36, 38.


  Jay:--
    Canada, 100.
    blue, 100.


  Kingbird, 9, 148, 179.


  Lady's-slipper, 79, 227, 239.

  Lapland Azalea, 31.

  Lark:--
    meadow, 53, 176.
    shore (or horned), 53.

  Linnaea, 216-218.


  Maryland Yellow-throat, 149, 192.

  Mount Cannon, 33.

  Mount Lafayette, 15, 24.

  Mount Mansfield, 90.


  November in Eastern Massachusetts, 36.

  Nuthatch, Red-bellied, 49, 55, 190.


  Oriole, Baltimore, 123, 176, 179.


  Peck's Geum, 23, 25, 31.

  Phoebe, 9, 10, 179.

  Pine Grosbeak, 26.

  Pine, white, 232.

  Plover:--
    golden, 202.
    killdeer, 39, 41.

  Poverty-Grass, 72, 81.

  Purple Gerardia, 81, 213.


  Redstart, 16, 190, 191.

  Robin, 55, 153, 184.

  Roses, 32, 81, 209.


  Scarlet Tanager, 176, 191.

  Screech Owl, 177.

  Smilax:--
    glauca, 80.
    rotundifolia, 80, 223.

  Snow Bunting, 53.

  Sparrow:--
    chipping, 179.
    field, 176.
    Ipswich, 53, 54.
    song, 53, 85, 176.
    vesper, 5, 110.
    white-throated, 16, 52, 91, 92, 102, 110, 190.

  Strawberry, 32, 223.

  Swallow, white-breasted, (Tree Swallow), 180, 183.

  Swift, Chimney, 110, 182.


  Thistles, 207.

  Thrush:--
    gray-cheeked, 16, 19, 94, 95, 97, 191.
    hermit, 19, 97.
    olive-backed, (or Swainson's), 19, 51, 97, 99, 191.
    water, 84.
    Wilson's (or veery), 17, 19, 98.
    wood, 98.

  Turnstone, 86.


  Veery (Wilson's Thrush), 17, 19, 98.

  Violets, 212, 219, 221.

  Vireo:--
    Philadelphia, 11.
    red-eyed, 11, 83, 153, 191.
    solitary (or blue-headed), 11, 13, 191.
    warbling, 14.


  Warbler:--
    bay-breasted, 6, 190.
    Blackburnian, 6, 16, 190, 191.
    black-and-yellow, (magnolia), 190.
    black-poll, 6, 16, 96, 99, 102, 190.
    black-throated blue, 16, 191.
    black-throated green, 16, 85, 190.
    blue golden-winged, 178.
    blue yellow-backed, 83, 190.
    Canadian flycatcher, 16, 190.
    Connecticut, 190.
    golden (summer yellow-bird), 192.
    Nashville, 8, 16.
    pine, 191.
    prairie, 84, 178.
    Tennessee, 5, 6.
    Wilson's black-cap, 186.
    yellow-rumped (myrtle), 95.

  White-winged Crossbill, 27.

  Winter Wren, 102.

  Witch-Hazel, 61, 228.

  Woodpecker:--
    downy, 50.
    golden-winged (flicker), 53, 69.
    yellow-bellied, 190.

  Wood Pewee, 9, 176.




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