By Dallas Lore Sharp AUTHOR OF “WILD LIFE NEAR HOME” AND “ROOF AND MEADOW” With Drawings by Elizabeth Myers Snagg BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1908 COPYRIGHT 1908 BY DALLAS LORE SHARP ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published September 1908 To the Memory of my Friend William Frank Morrison, M. D. The Muskrats are Building We have had a series of long, heavy rains, and water is standing over the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch, this wet, sedgy land in the c

The moon climbs higher. The water on the meadow shivers in the light. The wind bites through my heavy coat and sends me back, but not until I have seen one, two, three little figures scaling the walls of the house with loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am driven back by the cold, but not until I know that here in the desolate meadow is being rounded off a lodge, thick-walled and warm, and proof against the longest, bitterest of winters. This is near the end of November. My wood is in the cellar; I

And everywhere the Christmas spirit, too. As I paused among the pointed cedars of the pasture, looking down into the cripple at the head of the swamp, a clear wild whistle rang in the thicket, followed by a flash through the alders like a tongue of fire, as a cardinal grosbeak shot down to the tangle of greenbrier and magnolia under the slope. It was a fleck of flaming summer. As warm as summer, too, the stag-horn sumac burned on the crest of the ridge against the group of holly trees,—trees as

The prescription, then, should read:— ℞ A small farm—of an acre or more, A small income—of a thousand or more, A small family—of four boys or more, A real love of nature. Sig. Morning and evening chores. The dose to be taken daily, as long as winter lasts. This will cure. It is an old-fashioned household mixture that can be compounded in any country kitchen. But that is the trouble with it,—it is a home remedy that cannot be bought of the apothecary. There is more trouble with it, too, largely o

The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted in a very unscientific love for live dog. Not that I didn’t enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The problem of concrescence or differentiation in the cod’s egg also was intensely interesting to me. And so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I don’t blame him. “Well,” he said, turning abru

And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts—according to the philosopher. “We want only the facts of nature,” says the scientist. “Nothing in nature is worth while,” says the philosopher, “but mood, background, atmosphere.” “Nor can I recollect that my mind,” says one of our philosophers, “in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of n

and the last stanza ran:— He’s left the meadows burnt and hot, He’s left me lone and drear; But still within the white-birch lot Cheeps Chickadee—whom I forgot While Bobolink was here; which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not sing a while in June and then fly away and leave us. He stays the year around; he is constant and faithful in his friendship, though I sometimes forget. He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could have only one of the birds? As it is, I get along for more

Death had lingered cruelly. At first the animal had been able to gnaw; but as the tooth curved through the bones of the face and gradually tightened the jaws, the creature got less and less to eat, until, one day, creeping out of the burrow for food, the poor wretch was unable to get back. One seldom comes upon the like of this. It is commoner than we think; but it is usually hidden away and quickly over. How often do we see a wild thing sick,—a bird or animal suffering from an accident, or dyin

My spring, I should have said. Your spring came long ago, perhaps, or still delays. “The dandelion tells me when to look for the swallow, the dog-tooth violet when to expect the wood thrush, and when I have found the wake-robin in bloom I know the season is fairly inaugurated. With me this flower is associated, not merely with the awakening of Robin, for he has been awake some weeks, but with the universal awakening and rehabilitation of Nature.” I watch for the sign of the shad-bush. Spring! Th

This is what they find, many of these who are caught up by the movement toward the fields; but not all of them. A little five-year-old from the village came out to see me recently, and while playing in the orchard she brought me five flowers, called them by their right names, and told me how they grew. Down in the loneliest marshes of Delaware Bay I know a lighthouse keeper and his solitary neighbor, a farmer: both have been touched by this nature spirit; both are interested, informed, and obser

In the orchard there were half a dozen chippies’ nests, even more robins’, two nests of bluebirds, and one each of the tree swallow, flicker, yellow warbler, chebec, downy woodpecker, kingbird, great crested flycatcher, redstart, and screech owl. Baltimore orioles nested in the elms along the road; close to the little river were the nests of catbirds and red-winged blackbirds; a nest of swamp sparrows and of Maryland yellow-throats in the meadow, and in the woodlot a pewee’s nest, a crow’s nest,

But pick up the hen, study the falling of the feathers carefully, and lo! here is law and order, system and sequence, as if every feather were a star, every quill a planet, and the old white hen the round sphere of the universe. You will put her down reverently, awfully, this hen that you took up with such compassion, and you will say, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.” So it is, for the moult means a great deal more than the mere renewal of feathers, just how much more no one seems to kn

The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field. Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps under the wide, white glare. But already the noon is passing. Of the four seasons summer is the shortest, and the one we are least acquainted with. Summer is only a pause between spring and autumn, only the hour of the year’s

Phœbe is altogether more than his surroundings. Every time I go to feed the pig, he lights upon a post near by and says to me: “It’s what you are! Not what you do, but how you do it!”—with a launch into the air, a whirl, an unerring snap at a cabbage butterfly, and an easy drop to the post again, by way of illustration. “Not where you live, but how you live there; not the feathers you wear, but how you wear them,—it is what you are that counts!” There is a difference between being a “character”

And there were. A narrow strip of grass separated the orchard and my garden patch. It was on my way to the garden that I most often stopped to watch this chipmunk, or rather the pair of them, in the orchard wall. June advanced, the beetles disappeared, and my garden grew apace. For the first time in four years there were prospects of good strawberries. Most of my small patch was given over to a new berry, one that I had originated, and I was waiting with an eagerness which was almost anxiety for

The cost in time and trouble was what came near undoing my good uncle, with whom I was staying near the swamp. “What in thunderation!” he exclaimed, when I made known my desires. “From Boston to Haleyville to see a buzzard’s nest!” As there are some things that even one’s wife cannot quite understand, I didn’t try to reason the matter of buzzards’ nests with an uncle. If it had been a hawk’s nest or a cardinal’s, he would have thought nothing strange. But a buzzard’s! Perhaps my years of absence

If my skeptic found no fiddler crabs along her seashore, found nothing of interest smaller and more thing-like than color and fresh air, it may be that she did not understand how to look for crabs and things. To go to the seashore for one June, to the mountains for a second, to the farm for a third, is not a good way to study the out-of-doors. A better way is to spend all three Junes at this shore or upon this same farm. It is when one abides upon the farm, indeed, the year around, through sever