"What!" I exclaimed, turning in my tracks and addressing a s_Roof and Meadow

[Transcriber's Note: In this text, the spelling _racoon_ is used

consistently instead of _raccoon_. I have kept this and any other unusual

spellings, retaining the character of the original.]

Roof and Meadow

By Dallas Lore Sharp

Author of "A Watcher in the Woods"

With Illustrations By Bruce Horsfall

SCHOOL EDITION

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

The Century Co.

1911

_Published April, 1904._

MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

PAGE

BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF 1

THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK 19

THREE SERMONS 31

THE MARSH 45

CALICO AND THE KITTENS 77

THE SPARROW ROOST 91

"MUX" 107

RACOON CREEK 121

THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE 147

BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF

[Illustration]

ROOF AND MEADOW

BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF

I laid down my book and listened. It was only the choking gurgle of a

broken rain-pipe outside: then it was the ripple and swish of a meadow

stream. To make out the voices of redwings and marsh-wrens in the rasping

notes of the city sparrows behind the shutter required much more

imagination. But I did it. I wanted to hear, and the splash of the water

helped me.

The sounds of wind and water are the same everywhere. Here at the heart of

the city I can forget the tarry pebbles and painted tin whenever my

rain-pipes are flooded. I can never be wholly shut away from the open

country and the trees so long as the winds draw hard down the alley past

my window.

But I have more than a window and a broken rain-pipe. Along with my five

flights goes a piece of roof, flat, with a wooden floor, a fence, and a

million acres of sky. I couldn't possibly use another acre of sky, except

along the eastern horizon, where the top floors of some twelve-story

buildings intercept the dawn.

With such a roof and such a sky, when I must, I can, with effort, get well

out of the city. I have never fished nor botanized here, but I have been

a-birding many times.

Stone walls do not a prison make,

nor city streets a cage--if one have a roof.

A roof is not an ideal spot for bird study. I would hardly, out of

preference, have chosen this with its soot and its battlement of gaseous

chimney-pots, even though it is a university roof with the great gilded

dome of a state house shining down upon it. One whose feet have always

been in the soil does not take kindly to tar and tin. But anything open to

the sky is open to some of the birds, for the paths of many of the

migrants lie close along the clouds.

Other birds than the passing migrants, however, sometimes come within

range of my look-out. The year around there are English sparrows and

pigeons; and all through the summer scarcely an evening passes when a few

chimney-swallows are not in sight.

With the infinite number and variety of chimneys hedging me in, I

naturally expected to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I thought

that some of the twenty-six pots at the corners of my roof would be

inhabited by the birds. Not so. While I can nearly always find a pair of

swallows in the air, they are surprisingly scarce, and, so far as I know,

they rarely build in the heart of the city. There are more canaries in my

block than chimney-swallows in all my sky.

The swallows are not urban birds. The gas, the smoke, the shrieking

ventilators, and the ceaseless sullen roar of the city are hardly to their

liking. Perhaps the flies and gnats which they feed upon cannot live in

the air above the roofs. The swallows want a sleepy old town with big

thunderful chimneys, where there are wide fields and a patch of quiet

water.

Much more numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof, in

fact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits.

These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though the

finding of such nests would not surprise me. Of course a night-hawk's

_nest_, here or anywhere else, would surprise me; for like her cousin, the

whippoorwill, she never builds a nest, but stops in the grass, the gravel,

the leaves, or on a bare rock, deposits her eggs without even scratching

aside the sticks and stones that may share the bed, and in three days is

brooding them--brooding the stones too.

It is likely that some of my hawks nest on the buildings in the

neighborhood. Night-hawks' eggs have occasionally been found among the

pebbles of city roofs. The high, flat house-tops are so quiet and remote,

so far away from the noisy life in the narrow streets below, that the

birds make their nests here as if in a world apart. The twelve-and

fifteen-story buildings are as so many deserted mountain heads to them.

None of the birds build on my roof, however. But from early spring they

haunt the region so constantly that their families, if they have families

at all, must be somewhere in the vicinity. Should I see them like this

about a field or thicket in the country it would certainly mean a nest.

The sparrows themselves do not seem more at home here than do these

night-hawks. One evening, after a sultry July day, a wild wind-storm burst

over the city. The sun was low, glaring through a narrow rift between the

hill-crests and the clouds that spread green and heavy across the sky. I

could see the lower fringes of the clouds working and writhing in the

wind, but not a sound or a breath was in the air about me. Around me over

my roof flew the night-hawks. They were crying peevishly and skimming

close to the chimneys, not rising, as usual, to any height.

Suddenly the storm broke. The rain fell as if something had given way

overhead. The wind tore across the stubble of roofs and spires; and

through the wind, the rain, and the rolling clouds shot a weird,

yellow-green sunlight.

I had never seen a storm like it. Nor had the night-hawks. They seemed to

be terrified, and left the sky immediately. One of them, alighting on the

roof across the street, and creeping into the lee of a chimney, huddled

there in sight of me until the wind was spent and a natural sunlight

flooded the world of roofs and domes and spires.

Then they were all awing once more, hawking for supper. Along with the

hawking they got in a great deal of play, doing their tumbling and

cloud-coasting over the roofs just as they do above the fields.

Mounting by easy stages of half a dozen rapid strokes, catching flies by

the way, and crying _peent-peent_, the acrobat climbs until I look a mere

lump on the roof; then ceasing his whimpering _peent_, he turns on bowed

wings and falls--shoots roofward with fearful speed. The chimneys! Quick!

Quick he is. Just short of the roofs the taut wings flash a reverse, there

is a lightning swoop, a startling hollow wind-sound, and the rushing bird

is beating skyward again, hawking deliberately as before, and uttering

again his peevish nasal cry.

This single note, the only call he has besides a few squeaks, is far from

a song; farther still is the empty-barrel-bung-hole sound made by the air

in the rushing wings as the bird swoops in his fall. The night-hawk, alias

"bull-bat," does not sing. What a name bull-bat would be for a singing

bird! But a "voice" was never intended for the creature. Voice, beak,

legs, head--everything but wings and maw was sacrificed for a mouth. What

a mouth! The bird can almost swallow himself. Such a cleft in the head

could never mean a song; it could never be utilized for anything but a

fly-trap.

We have use for fly-traps. We need some birds just to sit around, look

pretty, and warble. We will pay them for it in cherries or in whatever

they ask. But there is also a great need for birds that kill insects. And

first among these are the night-hawks. They seem to have been designed for

this sole purpose. Their end is to kill insects. They are more like

machines than any other birds I know. The enormous mouth feeds an enormous

stomach, and this, like a fire-box, makes the power that works the

enormous wings. From a single maw have been taken eighteen hundred winged

ants, to say nothing of the smaller fry that could not be identified and

counted.

But if he never caught an ant, never one of the fifth-story mosquitos that

live and bite till Christmas, how greatly still my sky would need him! His

flight is song enough. His cry and eery thunder are the very voice of the

summer twilight to me. And as I watch him coasting in the evening dusk,

that twilight often falls--over the roofs, as it used to fall for me over

the fields and the quiet hollow woods.

There is always an English sparrow on my roof--which does not particularly

commend the roof to bird-lovers, I know. I often wish the sparrow an

entirely different bird, but I never wish him entirely away from the roof.

When there is no other defense for him, I fall back upon his being a

bird. Any kind of a bird in the city! Any but a parrot.

A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves-trough, so close to the roof

that I can overhear their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar Cock

Sparrow is a family man--so entirely a family man as to be nothing else at

all. He is a success, too. It does me good to see him build. He tore the

old nest all away in the early winter, so as to be ready. There came a

warm springish day in February, and he began. A blizzard stopped him, but

with the melting of the snow he went to work again, completing the nest by

the middle of March.

He built for a big family, and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but _them_; for

there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the

course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the

children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof

above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife

came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at

the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then

crawl dutifully in upon the eggs.

I knew how he felt. It is not in a cock sparrow to enjoy hatching eggs. I

respected him; for though he grumbled, as any normal husband might, still

he was "drinking fair" with Mrs. Sparrow. He built and brooded and foraged

for his family, if not as sweetly, yet as faithfully, as his wife. He

deserved his blessed abundance of children.

Is he songless, sooty, uninteresting, vulgar? Not if you live on a roof.

He may be all of this, a pest even, in the country. But upon my roof, for

weeks at a stretch, his is the only bird voice I hear. Throughout the

spring, and far into the summer, I watch the domestic affairs in the

eaves-trough. During the winter, at nightfall, I see little bands and

flurries of birds scudding over and dropping behind the high buildings to

the east. They are sparrows on the way to their roost in the elms of an

old mid-city burial-ground.

I not infrequently spy a hawk soaring calmly far away above the roof. Not

only the small ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger, wilder

species come, and winding up close to the clouds, circle and circle there,

trying apparently to see some meaning in the maze of moving, intersecting

lines of dots below yonder in the cracks of that smoking, rumbling blur.

In the spring, from the trees of the Common, which are close, but, except

for the crown of one noble English elm, are shut away from me, I hear an

occasional robin and Baltimore oriole. Very rarely a woodpecker will go

over. The great northern shrike is a frequent winter visitor, but by ill

chance I have not been up when he has called at the roof.

One of these fiend birds haunts a small court only a block away, which is

inclosed in a high board fence, topped with nails. He likes the court

because of these nails. They are sharp; they will stick clean through the

body of a sparrow. Sometimes the fiend has a dozen sparrows run through

with them, leaving the impaled bodies to flutter in the wind and finally

fall away.

In sight from my roof are three tiny patches of the harbor; sometimes a

fourth, when the big red-funneled liner is gone from her slip. Down to

the water of the harbor in flocks from the north come other winter

visitors, the herring and black-backed gulls. Often during the winter I

find them in my sky.

One day they will cross silently over the city in a long straggling line.

Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voices

shrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead, the

snow-white bodies of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the roofs

like patches of foam. I hear the sea--the wind, the surf, the wild, fierce

tumult of the shore--whenever the white gulls sail screaming into my

winter sky.

I have never lived under a wider reach of sky than that above my roof. It

offers a clear, straight, six-minute course to the swiftest wedge of wild

geese. Spring and autumn the geese and ducks go over, and their passage is

the most thrilling event in all my bird calendar.

It is because the ducks fly high and silent that I see them so rarely.

They are always a surprise. You look, and there against the dull sky they

move, strange dark forms that set your blood leaping. But I never see a

string of them winging over that I do not think of a huge thousand-legger

crawling the clouds.

My glimpses of the geese are largely chance, too. Several times, through

the open window by my table, I have heard the faint, far-off honking, and

have hurried to the roof in time to watch the travelers disappear. One

spring day I was upon the roof when a large belated flock came over,

headed north. It was the 20th of April, and the morning had broken very

warm. I could see that the geese were hot and tired. They were barely

clearing the church spires. On they came, their wedge wide and straggling,

until almost over me, when something happened. The gander in the lead

faltered and swerved, the wedge lines wavered, the flock rushed together

in confusion, wheeled, dropped, then broke apart, and honking wildly,

turned back toward the bay.

It was instant and complete demoralization. A stronger gander, I think,

could have led the wedge unbroken over the city to some neighboring pond,

where the weakest of the stragglers, however, must have fallen from sheer

exhaustion.

Scaling lower and lower across the roofs, the flock had reached the

center of the city and had driven suddenly into the roar and confusion of

the streets. Weary from the heat, they were dismayed at the noise, their

leader faltered, and, at a stroke, the great flying wedge went to pieces.

There is nothing in the life of birds quite so stirring to the imagination

as their migration: the sight of gathering swallows, the sudden appearance

of strange warblers, the call of passing plovers--all are suggestive of

instincts, movements, and highways that are unseen, unaccountable, and

full of mystery. Little wonder that the most thrilling poem ever written

to a bird begins:

Whither, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

The question, the mystery in that "certain flight" I never felt so vividly

as from my roof. Here I have often heard the reed-birds and the water-fowl

passing. Sometimes I have heard them going over in the dark. One night I

remember particularly, the sky and the air were so clear and the geese so

high in the blue.

Over the fields and wide silent marshes such passing is strange enough.

But here I stood above a sleeping city of men, and far above me, so far

that I could only hear them, holding their northward way through the

starlit sky, they passed--whither? and how guided? Was the shining dome of

the State House a beacon? Did they mark the light at Marblehead?

THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK

[Illustration]

THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK

... the chylde may Rue that ys vn-born, it wos the mor pitte.

There was murder in my heart. The woodchuck knew it. He never had had a

thought before, but he had one now. It came hard and heavily, yet it

arrived in time; and it was not a slow thought for a woodchuck,

either--just a trifle better, indeed, than my own.

This was the first time I had caught the woodchuck away from his hole. He

had left his old burrow in the huckleberry hillside, and dug a new hole

under one of my young peach-trees. I had made no objection to his

huckleberry hole. He used to come down the hillside and waddle into the

orchard in broad day, free to do and go as he pleased; but not since he

began to dig under the peach-tree.

I discovered this new hole when it was only a foot deep, and promptly

filled it with stones. The next morning the stones were out and the cavity

two feet deeper. I filled it up again, driving a large squarish piece of

rock into the mouth, tight, certainly stopping all further work, as I

thought.

There are woodchucks that you can discourage and there are those that you

can't. Three days later the piece of rock and the stones were piled about

the butt of the tree and covered with fresh earth, while the hole ran in

out of sight, with the woodchuck, apparently, at the bottom of it.

I had tried shutting him out, now I would try shutting him in. It was

cruel--it would have been to anything but a woodchuck; I was ashamed of

myself for doing it, and went back the following day, really hoping to

find the burrow open.

Never again would I worry over an imprisoned woodchuck; but then I should

never again try to destroy a woodchuck by walling up his hole, any more

than Br'er Fox would try to punish the rabbit by slinging him a second

time into the brier-patch.

The burrow was wide open. I had stuffed and rammed the rocks into it, and

buried deep in its mouth the body of another woodchuck that my neighbor's

dog had killed. All was cleared away. The deceased relative was

gone--where and how I know not; the stones were scattered on the farther

side of the tree, and the passage neatly swept of all loose sand and

pebbles.

Clearly the woodchuck had come to stay. I meant that he should move. I

could get him into a steel trap, for his wits are not abiding; they come

only on occasion. Woodchuck lives too much in the ground and too

constantly beside his own door to grow very wise. He can always be

trapped. So can any one's enemy. You can always murder. But no gentleman

strikes from behind. I hate the steel trap. I have set my last one. They

would be bitter peaches on that tree if they cost the woodchuck what I

have seen more than one woodchuck suffer in the horrible jaws of such a

trap.

But is it not perfectly legitimate and gentlemanly to shoot such a

woodchuck to save one's peaches? Certainly. So I got the gun and

waited--and waited--and waited. Did you ever wait with a gun until a

woodchuck came out of his hole? I never did. A woodchuck has just sense

enough to go into his hole--and stay in.

There were too many woodchucks about and my days were too precious for me

to spend any considerable part of my summer watching with a gun for this

one. Besides, I have been known to fire and miss a woodchuck, anyway.

So I gave up the gun. It was while thinking what I could do next that I

came down the row of young peach-trees and spied the woodchuck out in the

orchard, fifty yards away from his hole. He spied me at the same instant,

and rose upon his haunches.

At last we were face to face. The time had come. It would be a fight to

the finish; and a fair fight, too, for all that I had about me in the way

of weapons was a pair of heavy, knee-high hunting-boots, that I had put

on against the dew of the early morning. All my thought and energy, all my

hope, centered immediately in those boots.

The woodchuck kept his thoughts in his head. Into his heels he put what

speed he had; and little as that was, it counted, pieced out with the

head-work.

Back in my college days I ran a two-mile race--the greatest race of the

day, the judges said--and just at the tape lost two gold medals and the

glory of a new intercollegiate record because I didn't use my head. Two of

us out of twenty finished, and we finished together, the other fellow

twisting and falling forward, breaking the string with his side, while I,

pace for pace with him--didn't think.

For a moment the woodchuck and I stood motionless, he studying the

situation. I was at the very mouth of his burrow. It was coming to sure

death for him to attempt to get in. Yet it was sure death if he did not

get in, for I should run him down.

Had you been that woodchuck, gentle reader, I wonder if you would have

taken account of the thick-strewn stones behind you, the dense tangle of

dewberry-vines off on your left, the heavy boots of your enemy and his

unthinking rage?

I was vastly mistaken in that woodchuck. A blanker, flabbier face never

looked into mine. Only the sudden appearance of death could have brought

the trace of intelligence across it that I caught as the creature dropped

on all fours and began to wabble straight away from me over the area of

rough, loose stones.

With a jump and a yell I was after him, making five yards to his one. He

tumbled along the best he could, and, to my great surprise, directly away

from his hole. It was steep downhill. I should land upon him in half a

dozen bounds more.

On we went, reckless of the uneven ground, momentum increasing with every

jump, until, accurately calculating his speed and the changing distance

between us, I rose with a mighty leap, sailed into the air and came

down--just an inch too far ahead--on a round stone, turned my ankle, and

went sprawling over the woodchuck in a heap.

The woodchuck spilled himself from under me, slid short about, and

tumbled off for home by way of the dewberry-patch.

He had made a good start before I was righted and again in motion. Now it

was steep, very steep, uphill--which did not seem to matter much to the

woodchuck, but made a great difference to me. Then, too, I had counted on

a simple, straightaway dash, and had not saved myself for this lap and

climbing home-stretch.

Still I was gaining,--more slowly this time,--with chances yet good of

overtaking him short of the hole, when, in the thick of the

dewberry-vines, I tripped, lunged forward three or four stumbling strides,

and saw the woodchuck turn sharp to the right in a bee-line for his

burrow.

I wheeled, jumped, cut after him, caught him on the toe of my boot, and

lifting him, plopped him smoothly, softly into his hole.

It was gently done. And so beautifully! The whole feat had something of

the poetic accuracy of an astronomical calculation. And the perfectly

lovely dive I helped him make home!

I sat down upon his mound of earth to get myself together and to enjoy it

all. What a woodchuck! Perhaps he never could do the trick again; but,

then, he won't need to. All the murder was gone from my heart. He had

beaten the boots. He had beaten them so neatly, so absolutely, that simple

decency compelled me then and there to turn over that Crawford peach-tree,

root and stem, to the woodchuck, his heirs and assigns forever.

By way of celebration he has thrown out nearly a cart-load of sand from

somewhere beneath the tree, deepening and enlarging his home. My Swedish

neighbor, viewing the hole recently, exclaimed: "Dose vuudshuck, I t'ink

him kill dem dree!" Perhaps so. As yet, however, the tree grows on without

a sign of hurt.

But suppose the tree does die? Well, there is no certainty of its bearing

good fruit. There was once a peddler of trees, a pious man and a Quaker,

who made a mistake, selling the wrong tree. Besides, there are other trees

in the orchard; and, if necessary, I can buy peaches.

Yes, but what if other woodchucks should seek other roof-trees in the

peach row? They won't. There are no fashions, no such emulations,

out-of-doors. Because one woodchuck moves from huckleberries to a

peach-tree is no sign that all the woodchucks on the hillside are going to

forsake the huckleberries with him. Only humans are silly enough for that.

If the woodchucks should come, all of them, it would be extremely

interesting--an event worth many peaches.

THREE SERMONS

[Illustration]

THREE SERMONS

Thou shalt not preach.

The woods were as empty as some great empty house; they were hollow and

silent and somber. I stood looking in among the leafless trees, heavy in

spirit at the quiet and gloom, when close by my side spoke a tiny voice. I

started, so suddenly, so unexpectedly it broke into the wide December

silence, so far it echoed through the empty forest halls.

"What!" I exclaimed, turning in my tracks and addressing a small

brown-leafed beech. "What! little Hyla, are you still out? You! with a

snow-storm brewing and St. Nick due here to-morrow night?" And then from

within the bush, or on it, or under it, or over it, came an answer, _Peep,

peep, peep!_ small and shrill, dropping into the silence of the woods and

stirring it as three small pebbles might drop into the middle of a wide

sleeping pond.

It was one of those gray, heavy days of the early winter--one of the

vacant, spiritless days of portent that wait hushed and numb before a

coming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough to

cheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the last

week in February, throughout the spring and the noisy summer on till this

dreary time, he had been cheerfully, continuously piping. This was his

last call.

_Peep, peep, peep!_ he piped in February; _Peep, peep, peep!_ in August;

_Peep, peep, peep!_ in December. But did he?

"He did just that," replies the scientist, "and that only."

"Not at all," I answer.

"What authority have you?" he asks. "You are not scientific. You are

merely a dreaming, fooling hanger-on to the fields and woods; one of those

who are forever hearing more than they hear, and seeing more than they

see. We scientists hear with our ears, see with our eyes, feel with our

fingers, and understand with our brains--"

"Just so, just so," I interrupt, "and you are a worthy but often a pretty

stupid set. Little Hyla in February, August, and December cries _Peep,

peep, peep!_ to you. But his cry to me in February is _Spring, spring,

spring!_ And in December--it depends; for I cannot see with my eyes alone,

nor hear with my ears, nor feel with my fingers only. You can, and so

could Peter Bell. To-day I saw and heard and felt the world all gray and

hushed and shrouded; and little Hyla, speaking out of the silence and

death, called _Cheer, cheer, cheer!_"

It is not because the gate is strait and the way narrow that so few get

into the kingdom of the Out-of-Doors. The gate is wide and the way is

broad. The difficulty is that most persons go in too fast.

If I were asked what virtue, above all others, one must possess in order

to be shown the mysteries of the kingdom of earth and sky, I should say,

there are several; I should not know which to name first. There are,

however, two virtues very essential and very hard to acquire, namely, the

ability to keep quiet and to stand still.

Last summer a fox in two days took fifteen of my chickens. I saw the

rascal in broad day come down the hill to the chicken-yard. I greatly

enjoy the sight of a wild fox; but fifteen chickens a sight was too high a

price. So I got the gun and chased about the woods half the summer for

another glimpse of the sinner's red hide. I saw him one Sunday as we were

driving into the wood road from church; but never a week-day sight for all

my chasing.

Along in the early autumn I got home one evening shortly after sundown. I

had left several cocks of hay spread out in the little meadow, and though

it was already pretty damp, I took the fork, went down, and cocked it up.

Returning, I climbed by the narrow, winding path through the pines, out

into the corner of my pasture. It was a bright moonlight night, and

leaning back upon the short-handled fork, I stopped in the shadow of the

pines to look out over the softly lighted field.

Off in the woods a mile away sounded the deep, mellow tones of two

foxhounds. Day and night all summer long I had heard them, and all summer

long I had hurried to this knoll and to that for a shot. But the fox

always took the other knoll.

The echoing cries of the dogs through the silent woods were musical. Soon

they sounded sharp and clear--the hounds were crossing an open stretch

leading down to the meadow behind me. As I leaned, listening, I heard near

by a low, uneasy murmuring from a covey of quails sleeping in the brush

beside the path, and before I had time to think what it meant, a fox

trotted up the path I had just climbed, and halted in the edge of the

shadows directly at my feet.

I stood as stiff as a post. He sniffed at my dew-wet boots, backed away,

and looked me over curiously. I could have touched him with my fork. Then

he sat down with just his silver-tipped brush in the silver moonlight, to

study me in earnest.

The loud baying of the hounds was coming nearer. How often I had heard it,

and, in spite of my lost chickens, how often I had exclaimed, "Poor little

tired fox!" But here sat "poor little tired fox" with his tongue in his

head, calmly wondering what kind of stump he had run up against this time.

I could only dimly see his eyes, but his whole body said: "I can't make it

out, for it doesn't move. But so long as it doesn't move I sha'n't be

scared." Then he trotted to this side and to that for a better wind,

somewhat afraid, but much more curious.

His time was up, however. The dogs were yelping across the meadow on his

warm trail. Giving me a last unsatisfied look, he dropped down the path,

directly toward the dogs, and sprang lightly off into the thicket.

The din of their own voices must have deafened the dogs, or they would

have heard him. Round and round they circled, giving the fox ample time

for the study of another "stump" before they discovered that he had

doubled down the path, and still longer time before they crossed the wide

scentless space of his side jump and once more fastened upon his trail.

III

Back in my knickerbocker days I once went off on a Sunday-school picnic,

and soon, replete with "copenhagen," I sauntered into the woods alone in

quest of less cloying sport. I had not gone far when I picked up a dainty

little ribbon-snake, and having no bag or box along, I rolled him up in my

handkerchief, and journeyed on with the wiggling reptile safely caged on

top of my head under my tight-fitting hat.

After a time I began to feel a peculiar movement under the hat, not

exactly the crawling of a normal snake, but more like that of a snake with

legs. Those were the days when all my soul was bent on the discovery of a

new species--of anything; when the whole of life meant a journey to the

Academy of Natural Sciences with something to be named. For just an

instant flashed the hope that I had found an uncursed snake, one of the

original ones that went on legs. I reached for the hat, bent over, and

pulled it off, and, lo! not a walking snake. Just an ordinary snake, but

with it a live wood-frog!

This, at least, was interesting, the only real piece of magic I have ever

done. Into my hat had gone only a live snake, now I brought forth the

snake and a live frog. This was a snake to conjure with; so I tied him up

again and finally got him home.

The next Sunday the minister preached a temperance sermon, in which he

said some dreadful things about snakes. The creatures do seem in some

dark, horrible way to lurk in the dregs of strong drink: but the minister

was not discriminating; he was too fierce and sweeping, saying, among

other things, that there was a universal human hatred for snakes, and that

one of the chief purposes of the human heel was to bruise their scaly

heads.

I was not born of my Quaker mother to share this "universal human hatred

for snakes"; but I did get from her a wild dislike for sweeping, general

statements. After the sermon I ventured to tell the preacher that there

was an exception to this "universal" rule; that all snakes were not adders

and serpents, but some were just innocent snakes, and that I had a

collection of tame ones which I wished he would come out to see.

He looked astonished, skeptical, then pained. It was during the days, I

think, of my "probation," and into his anxious heart had come the thought,

Was I "running well"? But he dismissed the doubt and promised to walk over

in the morning.

His interest amazed me. But, then, preachers quite commonly are different

on Monday. As we went from cage to cage, he said he had read how

boa-constrictors eat, and wouldn't I show him how these snakes eat?

We had come to the cage of the little ribbon-snake from the picnic grove,

and had arrived just in time to catch him crawling away out of a hole that

he had worked in the rusty mosquito-netting wire of the cover. I caught

him, put him back, and placed a brickbat over the hole.

I knew that this snake was hungry, because he had had nothing to eat for

nearly a week, and the frog which appeared so mysteriously with him in my

hat was the dinner that he had given up that day of his capture in his

effort to escape.

The minister looked on without a tremor. I took off the brick that he

might see the better. The snake was very long and small around and the

toad, which I had given him, was very short and big around, so that when

it was all over there was a bunch in the middle of the snake comparable to

the lump a prime watermelon would make in the middle of a small boy if

swallowed whole.

While we were still watching, the snake, having comfortably (for a snake)

breakfasted, saw the hole uncovered and stuck out his head. We made no

move. Slowly, cautiously, with his eye upon us, he glided out, up to the

big bunch of breakfast in his middle. This stuck. Frantically he squirmed,

whirled, and lashed about, but in vain. He could not pull through. He had

eaten too much.

There was just one thing for him to do if he would be free: give up the

breakfast of toad (which is much better fare according to snake standards

than pottage according to ours), as he had given up the dinner of frog.

Would he sell his birthright?

Perhaps a snake cannot calculate; perhaps he knows no conflict of

emotions. Yet something very like these processes seemed to go on within

the scaly little reptile. He ceased all violent struggle, laid his length

upon the netting, and _seemed_ to think, to weigh the chances, to count

the cost.

Soon he softly drew back into the cage. A series of severe contortions

followed; the obstructing bunch began to move forward, up, farther and

farther, until at last, dazed, squeezed, and half smothered, but entirely

alive and unhurt, the toad appeared and once more opened his eyes to the

blessed light.

The snake quickly put his head through the hole, slipped out again, and

glided away into his freedom. He had earned it. The toad deserved his

liberty too, and I took him into the strawberry-patch.

The minister looked on at it all. Perhaps he didn't learn anything. But I

did.

THE MARSH

[Illustration]

THE MARSH

And breathe it free, and breathe it free,

By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty.

It was a late June day whose breaking found me upon the edge of the great

salt-marshes which lie behind East Point Light, as the Delaware Bay lies

in front of it, and which run in a wide, half-land, half-bay border down

the cape.

I followed along the black sandy road which goes to the Light until close

to the old Zane's Place,--the last farm-house of the uplands,--when I

turned off into the marsh toward the river. The mosquitos rose from the

damp grass at every step, swarming up around me in a cloud, and streaming

off behind like a comet's tail, which hummed instead of glowed. I was the

only male among them. It was a cloud of females, the nymphs of the

salt-marsh; and all through that day the singing, stinging, smothering

swarm danced about me, rested upon me, covered me whenever I paused, so

that my black leggings turned instantly to a mosquito brown, and all my

dress seemed dyed alike.

Only I did not pause--not often, nor long. The sun came up blisteringly

hot, yet on I walked, and wore my coat, my hands deep down in the pockets

and my head in a handkerchief. At noon I was still walking, and kept on

walking till I reached the bay shore, when a breeze came up, and drove the

singing, stinging fairies back into the grass, and saved me.

I left the road at a point where a low bank started across the marsh like

a long protecting arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, dragging them

away from the grasping river, and gathering them out of the vast undrained

tract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the upland. Passing along the bank

until beyond the weeds and scrub of the higher borders, I stood with the

sky-bound, bay-bound green beneath my feet. Far across, with sails

gleaming white against the sea of sedge, was a schooner, beating slowly up

the river. Laying my course by her, I began to beat slowly out into the

marsh through the heavy sea of low, matted hay-grass.

There is no fresh-water meadow, no inland plain, no prairie with this

rainy, misty, early morning freshness so constant on the marsh; no other

reach of green so green, so a-glitter with seas of briny dew, so

regularly, unfailingly fed:

Look how the grace of the sea doth go

About and about through the intricate channels that flow

Here and there,

Everywhere,

Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,

And the marsh is meshed with a million veins!

I imagine a Western wheat-field, half-way to head, could look, in the dew

of morning, somewhat like a salt-marsh. It certainly would have at times

the purple-distance haze, that atmosphere of the sea which hangs across

the marsh. The two might resemble each other as two pictures of the same

theme, upon the same scale, one framed and hung, the other not. It is the

framing, the setting of the marsh that gives it character, variety, tone,

and its touch of mystery.

For the marsh reaches back to the higher lands of fences, fields of corn,

and ragged forest blurs against the hazy horizon; it reaches down to the

river of the reedy flats, coiled like a serpent through the green; it

reaches away to the sky where the clouds anchor, where the moon rises,

where the stars, like far-off lighthouses, gleam along the edge; and it

reaches out to the bay, and on, beyond the white surf-line of meeting, on,

beyond the line where the bay's blue and the sky's blue touch, on, far on.

Here meet land and river, sky and sea; here they mingle and make the

marsh.

A prairie rolls and billows; the marsh lies still, lies as even as a

sleeping sea. Yet what moods! What changes! What constant variety of

detail everywhere! In The Marshes of Glynn there was

A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,

Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,

but not in these Maurice River marshes. Here, to-day, the sun was blazing,

kindling millions of tiny suns in the salt-wet blades; and instead of

waist-high grass, there lay around me acres and acres of the fine rich

hay-grass, full-grown, but without a blade wider than a knitting-needle or

taller than my knee. It covered the marsh like a deep, thick fur, like a

wonderland carpet into whose elastic, velvety pile my feet sank and sank,

never quite feeling the floor. Here and there were patches of higher

sedges, green, but of differing shades, which seemed spread upon the grass

carpet like long-napped rugs.

Ahead of me the even green broke suddenly over a shoal of sand into tall,

tufted grasses, into rose, mallow, and stunted persimmon bushes, foaming,

on nearer view, with spreading dogbane blossoms. Off toward the bay

another of these shoals, mole-hill high in the distance, ran across the

marsh for half a mile, bearing a single broken file of trees--sentinels

they seemed, some of them fallen, others gaunt and wind-beaten, watching

against the sea.

These were the lookouts and the resting-places for passing birds. During

the day, whenever I turned in their direction, a crow, a hawk, or some

smaller bird was seen upon their dead branches.

Naturally the variety of bird life upon the marsh is limited; but there is

by no means the scarcity here which is so often noted in the forests and

wild prairies of corresponding extent. Indeed, the marsh was birdy--rich

in numbers if not in species. Underfoot, in spots, sang the marsh-wrens;

in larger patches the sharp-tailed sparrows; and almost as wide-spread and

constant as the green was the singing of the seaside sparrows. Overhead

the fish-hawks crossed frequently to their castle nest high on the top of

a tall white oak along the land edge of the marsh; in the neighborhood of

the sentinel trees a pair of crows were busy trying (it seemed to me) to

find an oyster, a crab--something big enough to choke, for just one

minute, the gobbling, gulping clamor of their infant brood. But the dear

devouring monsters could not be choked, though once or twice I thought by

their strangling cries that father crow, in sheer desperation, had brought

them oysters with the shells on. Their awful gaggings died away at dusk.

Besides the crows and fish-hawks, a harrier would now and then come

skimming close along the grass. Higher up, the turkey-buzzards circled all

day long; and once, setting my blood leaping and the fish-hawks screaming,

there sailed over, far away in the blue, a bald-headed eagle, his snowy

neck and tail flashing in the sunlight as he careened among the clouds.

In its blended greens the marsh that morning offered one of the most

satisfying drinks of color my eyes ever tasted. The areas of different

grasses were often acres in extent, so that the tints, shading from the

lightest pea-green of the thinner sedges to the blue-green of the rushes,

to the deep emerald-green of the hay-grass, merged across their broad

bands into perfect harmony.

As fresh and vital as the color was the breath of the marsh. There is no

bank of violets stealing and giving half so sweet an odor to my nostrils,

outraged by a winter of city smells, as the salty, spray-laden breath of

the marsh. It seems fairly to line the lungs with ozone. I know how

grass-fed cattle feel at the smell of salt. I have the concentrated thirst

of a whole herd when I catch that first whiff of the marshes after a

winter, a year it may be, of unsalted inland air. The smell of it

stampedes me. I gallop to meet it, and drink, drink, drink deep of it, my

blood running redder with every draught.

I had waded out into the meadow perhaps two hundred yards, leaving a dark

bruised trail in the grass, when I came upon a nest of the long-billed

marsh-wren. It was a bulky house, and so overburdened its frail sedge

supports that it lay almost upon the ground, with its little round doorway

wide open to the sun and rain. They must have been a young couple who

built it, and quite inexperienced. I wonder they had not abandoned it;

for a crack of light into a wren's nest would certainly addle the eggs.

They are such tiny, dusky, tucked-away things, and their cradle is so deep

and dark and hidden. There were no fatalities, I am sure, following my

efforts to prop the leaning structure, though the wrens were just as sure

that it was all a fatality--utterly misjudging my motives. As a rule, I

have never been able to help much in such extremities. Either I arrive too

late, or else I blunder.

I thought, for a moment, that it was the nest of the long-billed's cousin,

the short-billed marsh-wren, that I had found--which would have been a gem

indeed, with pearly eggs instead of chocolate ones. Though I was out for

the mere joy of being out, I had really come with a hope of discovering

this mousy mite of a wren, and of watching her ways. It was like hoping to

watch the ways of the "wunk." Several times I have been near these little

wrens; but what chance has a pair of human eyes with a skulking four

inches of brownish streaks and bars in the middle of a marsh! Such birds

are the everlasting despair of the naturalist, the salt of his earth. The

belief that a pair of them dwelt somewhere in this green expanse, that I

might at any step come upon them, made me often forget the mosquitos.

When I reached the ridge of rose and mallow bushes, two wrens began

muttering in the grass with different notes and tones from those of the

long-billed. I advanced cautiously. Soon one flashed out and whipped back

among the thick stems again, exposing himself just long enough to show me

_stellaris_, the little short-billed wren I was hunting.

I tried to stand still for a second glimpse and a clue to the nest; but

the mosquitos! Things have come to a bad pass with the bird-hunter, whose

only gun is an opera-glass, when he cannot stand stock-still for an hour.

His success depends upon his ability to take root. He needs light feet, a

divining mind, and many other things, but most of all he needs patience.

There are few mortals, however, with mosquito-proof patience--one that

would stand the test here. Remembering a meadow in New England where

stellaris nested, I concluded to wait till chance took me thither, and

passed on.

This ridge of higher ground proved to be a mosquito roost--a thousand

here to one in the deeper, denser grass. As I hurried across I noted with

great satisfaction that the pink-white blossoms of the spreading dogbane

were covered with mosquito carcasses. It lessened my joy somewhat to find,

upon examination, that all the victims were males. Either they had drunk

poison from the flowers, or else, and more likely, they had been unable to

free their long-haired antennæ from the sticky honey into which they had

dipped their innocent beaks. Several single flowers had trapped three, and

from one blossom I picked out five. If we could bring the dogbane to brew

a cup which would be fatal to the females, it might be a good plant to

raise in our gardens along with the eucalyptus and the castor-oil plants.

Everywhere as I went along, from every stake, every stout weed and topping

bunch of grass, trilled the seaside sparrows--a weak, husky, monotonous

song, of five or six notes, a little like the chippy's, more tuneful,

perhaps, but not so strong. They are dark, dusky birds, of a grayish

olive-green hue, with a conspicuous yellow line before the eye, and

yellow upon the shoulder.

There seems to be a sparrow of some kind for every variety of land between

the poles. Mountain-tops, seaside marshes, inland prairies, swamps, woods,

pastures--everywhere, from Indian River to the Yukon, a sparrow nests. Yet

one can hardly associate sparrows with marshes, for they seem out of place

in houseless, treeless, half-submerged stretches. These are the haunts of

the shyer, more secretive birds. Here the ducks, rails, bitterns,

coots,--birds that can wade and swim, eat frogs and crabs,--seem naturally

at home. The sparrows are perchers, grain-eaters, free-fliers, and

singers; and they, of all birds, are the friends and neighbors of man.

This is no place for them. The effect of this marsh life upon the flight

and song of these two species was very marked. Both showed unmistakable

vocal powers which long ago would have been developed under the stimulus

of human listeners; and during all my stay (so long have they crept and

skulked about through the low marsh paths) I did not see one rise a

hundred feet into the air, nor fly straight away for a hundred yards.

They would get up just above the grass, and flutter and drop--a puttering,

short-winded, apoplectic struggle, very unbecoming and unworthy.

By noon I had completed a circle and recrossed the lighthouse road in the

direction of the bay. A thin sheet of lukewarm water lay over all this

section. The high spring tides had been reinforced by unusually heavy

rains during April and May, giving a great area of pasture and hay land

back, for that season, to the sea. Descending a copsy dune from the road,

I surprised a brood of young killdeers feeding along the drift at the edge

of the wet meadow. They ran away screaming, leaving behind a pair of

spotted sandpipers, "till-tops," that had been wading with them in the

shallow water. The sandpipers teetered on for a few steps, then rose at my

approach, scaled nervously out over the drowned grass, and, circling,

alighted near where they had taken wing, continuing instantly with their

hunt, and calling _Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet_, and teetering, always

teetering, as they tiptoed along.

If perpetual motion is still a dream of the physicist, he might get an

idea by carefully examining the way the body of till-top is balanced on

its needle legs. If till-tops have not been tilting forever, and shall not

go on tilting forever, it is because something is wrong with the mechanism

of the world outside their little spotted bodies. Surely the easiest,

least willed motion in all the universe is this sandpiper's teeter,

teeter, teeter, as it hurries peering and prying along the shore.