IX

The Honey Flow

And this our life, exempt from public haunt and those swift currents that carry the city-dweller resistlessly into the movie show, leaves us caught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant things,—digging among the rutabagas, playing the hose at night, casting the broody hens into the "dungeon," or watching the bees.

Many hours of my short life I have spent watching the bees,—blissful, idle hours, saved from the wreck of time, hours fragrant of white clover and buckwheat and filled with the honey of nothing-to-do; every minute of them capped, like the comb within the hive, against the coming winter of my discontent. If, for the good of mankind, I could write a new Commandment to the Decalogue, it would read: Thou shalt keep a hive of bees.

Let one begin early, and there is more health in a hive of bees than in a hospital; more honey, too, more recreation and joy for the philosophic mind, though no one will deny that very many persons prepare themselves both in body and mind for the comforting rest and change of the hospital with an almost solemn joy.

But personally I prefer a hive of bees. They are a sure cure, it is said, for rheumatism, the patient making bare the afflicted part, then with it stirring up the bees. But it is saner and happier to get the bees before you get the rheumatism and prevent its coming. No one can keep bees without being impressed with the wisdom of the ounce of prevention.

I cannot think of a better habit to contract than keeping bees. What a quieting, pastoral turn it gives to life! You can keep them in the city—on the roof or in the attic—just as you can actually live in the city, if you have to; but bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural prospect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls,—things out of Virgil, and Theocritus—and out of Spenser too,—

"And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,And ever drizling raine upon the loft,Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowneOf swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne:No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,As still are wont t' annoy the walled towneMight there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes"

that is not the land of the lotus, but of themelli-lotus, of lilacs, red clover, mint, and goldenrod—a land of honey-bee. Show me the bee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softly like Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; an observer of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves. Only a few men keep bees,—only philosophers, I have found. They are a different order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising being respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though there are some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is in euphony, rhythm, and tune.

In fact there is not much to be said for the bee, not much that the public can understand; for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that is the true American bird, but the rooster. In one of my neighboring towns five thousand petitioners recently prayed the mayor that they be allowed to let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. In all that town, peradventure, not five bee-keepers could be found, and for the same reason that so few righteous men were found in Sodom.

Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceedingly difficult; it is one of the fine arts, and no dry-mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens. Queens are a peculiar people, and their royal households, sometimes an hundred thousand strong, are as individual as royal houses are liable to be.

I have never had two queens alike, never two colonies that behaved the same, never two seasons that made a repetition of a particular handling possible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; the strain of the bees, the age and disposition of the queen, the condition of the colony, the state of the weather, the time of the season, the little-understood laws of the honey-flow,—these singly, and often all in combination, make the wisest handling of a colony of bees a question fresh every summer morning and new every evening.

For bees should be "handled," that is, bees left to their own devices may make you a little honey—ten to thirty pounds in the best of seasons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily make you three hundred pounds of pure comb honey—food of prophets, and with saleratus biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the sons of prophets here on Mullein Hill.

Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey? Not often, for it is only rarely that the colony can be built up to a strength sufficient to store this earliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; and then as the season advances, and flow after flow comes on with the breaking of the great floral waves, I get other flavors,—pure white clover, wild raspberry, golden sumac, pearly white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease, and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the goldenrod. These, by careful watching, I get pure and true to flavor like so many fruit extracts at the soda fountains.

Then sometimes the honey for a whole season will be adulterated, not by anything that I have done, but by the season's peculiar conditions, or by purely local conditions,—conditions that may not prevail in the next town at all.

One year it began in the end of July. The white clover flow was over and the bees were beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of the dwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives soon after the renewed activity commenced, I noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, and saw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and making for a pasture somewhere over the sprout-land that lay to the north of the hives. Yet I felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that direction within range of my bees (they will fly off two miles for food); nothing but dense hardwood undergrowth from stumps cut some few years before.

Marking their line of flight I started into the low jungle to find them. I was half a mile in when I caught the busy hum of wings. I looked but could see nothing,—not a flower of any sort, nothing but oak, maple, birch, and young pine saplings just a little higher than my head. But the air was full of bees; yet not of swarming bees, for that is a different and unmistakable hum. Then I found myself in the thick of a copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of which the bees were wildly buzzing. There was no dew left on the bushes, so it was not that they were after; on looking more closely I saw that they were crawling down the stems to the little burrs containing the seed of last fall's flowering. Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legs they seemed to drink head down from out of the base of the burr.

Picking one of these, I found a hole at its base, and inside, instead of seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the bees were milking. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinking from the same pail.

But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plant louse. I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued from the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in the thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr after burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for the bees to puncture and drain. The largest of them would fill a bee at a draught. Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle unknown to me,—the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the hole at the base, and left the burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides. These in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying this "honey-dew" home, mixed it with the pure nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop.

Can you put stoppers into these millions of honey-dew jugs? Can you command your bees to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes? Hardly that, but you can clip the wing of your queen and make her obedient; you can command the colony not to swarm, not to waste its strength in drones, and you can tell it where and how to put this affected honey so that the pure crop is not spoiled; you can order the going out and coming in of those many thousands so that every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient servant, gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer from every bank whereon the clover and the wild mints blow.

Small things these for a man with anything to do? Small indeed, but demanding large love and insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge. It does not follow that a man who can handle a colony of bees can rule his spirit or take a city, but the virtues absolutely necessary to the bee-keeper are those required for the guiding of nations; and there should be a bee-plank incorporated into every party platform, promising that president, cabinet, and every member of congress along with the philosophers shall keep bees.

A pair of pigs

I dropped down beside Her on the back steps and took a handful of her peas to pod. She set the colander between us, emptied half of her task into my hat, and said:—

"It is ten o'clock. I thought you had to be at your desk at eight this morning? And you are hot and tired. What is it you have been doing?"

"Getting ready for thepigs," I replied, laying marked and steady emphasis on the plural.

"You are putting the pods among the peas and the peas with the pods"—and so I was. "Then we are going to have another pig," she went on.

"No, notapig this time; I think I 'll get a pair. You see while you are feeding one you can just as well be feeding—"

"A lot of them," she said with calm conviction.

"You 're right!" I exclaimed, a little eagerly. "Besides two pigs do better than—"

"Well, then," very gravely and never pausing for an instant in her shelling, "let's fence in the fourteen acres and have a nice little piggery of Mullein Hill."

The pods popped and split in her nimble fingers as if she knew a secret spring in their backs. I can beat her picking peas, but in shelling peas she seems to have more fingers than I have; they quite confuse me at times as they twinkle at their task.

So they did now. I had spent several weeks working up my brief for two pigs; but was utterly unprepared for a whole piggery. The suddenness of it, the sweep and compass of it, left me powerless to pod the peas for a moment.

I ought to have been at my writing, but it was too late to mention that now; besides here was my hat still full of peas. I could not ungallantly dump them back into her empty pan and quit. There was nothing for it but to pod on and stop with one pig. But my heart was set on a pair of pigs. College had just closed (we were having our 17th of June peas) and the joy of the farm was upon me. I had a cow and a heifer, eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives of bees, and two ducks. I was planning to build a pigeon coop, and had long talked of turning the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining my farm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk at one dollar a quart to Boston babies; I had thought somewhat of Belgian hares and black foxes as a side-line; and in addition to these my heart was set on a pair of pigs.

"Why won't one pig do?" she would ask. And I tried to explain; but there are things that cannot be explained to the feminine mind, things perfectly clear to a man that you cannot make a woman see.

Pigs, I told her, naturally go by pairs, like twins and scissors and tongs. They do better together, as scissors do. Nobody ever bought ascissor. Certainly not. Pigs need the comfort of one another's society, and the diversion of one another to take up their minds in the pen; hens I explained were not the only broody creatures, for all animals show the tendency, and does not the Preacher say, "Two are better than one: if two lie together then have they heat: but how can one be warm alone"?

I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had pigs in mind, for judging by the number of pig-prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, they must have had pigsconstantlyin mind. This observation of the early Hebrew poet and preacher is confirmed, I added, by all the modern agricultural journals, as well as by all our knowing neighbors. Even the Flannigans (an Irish family down the road),—even the Flannigans, I pointed out, always have two pigs, for all their eight children and his job tending gate at the railroad crossing. They have a goat, too. If a man with that sort of job can have eight children and a goat and two pigs, why can't a college professor have a few of the essential, elementary things, I 'd like to know?

"Do you call your four boys a few?" she asked.

"I don't call my four Flannigan's eight," I replied, "nor my one pig his two. Flannigan has the finest pigs on the road. He has a wonderful way with a pair of pigs—something he inherited, I suppose, for I imagine there have been pigs in the Flannigan family ever since—"

"They were kings in Ireland," she put in sweetly.

"Flannigan says," I continued, "that I ought to have two pigs: 'For shure, a pair o' pags is double wan pag,' says Flannigan—good clear logic it strikes me, and quite convincing."

She picked up the colander of shelled peas with a sigh. "We shall want the new potatoes and fresh salmon to go with these," her mind not on pigs at all, but on the dinner. "Can't you dig me a few?"

"I might dig up a few fresh salmon," I replied, "but not any new potatoes, for they have just got through the ground."

"But if I wanted you to, could n't you?"

"I don't see how I could if there are n't any to dig."

"But won't you go look—dig up a few hills—you can't tell until you look. You said you did n't leave the key outside in the door yesterday when we went to town, but you did. And as for a lot of pigs—"

"I don't want a lot of pigs," I protested.

"But you do, though. You want a lot of everything. Here you 've planted five hundred cabbages for winter just as if we were a sauerkraut factory—and the probabilities are we shall go to town this winter—"

"Go where!" I cried.

"And as for pigs, your head is as full of pigs as Deerfoot Farm or the Chicago stockyards—

Mullein Hill SausagesMade of Little Pigs

that's really your dream"—spelling out the advertisement with pea-pods on the porch floor.

"Now, don't you think it best to save some things for your children,—this sausage business, say,—and you go on with your humble themes and books?"

She looked up at me patiently, sweetly inscrutable as she added:—

"You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite sure; but two pigs are nothing short of the pig business, and that is not what we are living here on Mullein Hill for."

She went in with her peas and left me with my pigs—or perhaps they were her thoughts; leaving thoughts around being a habit of hers.

What did she mean by my needing a pig? She was quite sure I neededonepig. Is it my own peculiar, personal need? That can hardly be, for I am not different from other men. There may be in all men, deep down and unperceived, except by their wives, perhaps, traits and tendencies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think this must be so, for while she has always said we need the cow or the chickens or the parsley, she has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred to invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in a barrel.

The pig as my property, or rather as my peculiar privilege, is utterly unrelated in her mind tosaltpork. And she is right about that. No man needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody knows that it costs less to buy your pig in the barrel. And there is little that is edifying about a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind with cheerful thoughts before descending into the dark of the cellar to fish a cold, white lump of the late pig out of the pickle.

Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming pork, but for the certain present joy of hisbeingpork, does a man need a pig. In all his other possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig he has a constant, present reward: because the pigisand there is no question as to what he shall be. He is pork and shall be salt pork, not spirit, to our deep relief.

Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with lard, a fatty, opaque, snow-white substance, that boils and grows limpid clear and flames with heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as butter, nevertheless it is one of earth's pure essences, perfected, sublimated, not after the soul with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and solid comfort—the most abundant of one's possessions, yet except to the pig the most difficult of all one's goods to bestow.

The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the flower in the crannied wall, not so sure of the very stones in the wall, so long have they been, so long shall be; but the pig—no one ever plucked up a pig from his sty to say,—

"I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand,Little pig--but _if_ I could understandWhat you are, squeal and all, and all in all"--

No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they have kept pigs. Here is Matthew Arnold writing to his mother aboutLiterature and Dogmaand poems and—"The two pigs are grown very large and handsome, and Peter Wood advises us to fatten them and kill our own bacon. We consume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains that it is dear and not good, so there is much to be said for killing our own; but she does not seem to like the idea."

"Very large and handsome "—this from the author of

"The evening comes, the fields are still!"

And here is his wife, again, not caring to have them killed, finding, doubtless, a better use for them in the pen, seeing that Matthew often went out there to scratch them.

Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I think, from their poetry. For a big snoring pig is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little roast pig; and what an escape from books and people and parlors (in this country) is the feeding and littering and scratching of him! You put on your old clothes for him. He takes you out behind the barn; there shut away from the prying gaze of the world, and the stern eye, conscience, you deliberately fill him, stuff him, fatten him, till he grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunting, yourself reveling in the sight of the flesh indulged, as you dare not indulge any other flesh. You would love to feed the whole family that way; only it would not be good for them. You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the hens so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy for the horse, andscratch-feed, for the hens—feed to compel them to scratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and the children's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces your soul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgo your—you getyoua medicine ball, I should say, in order to keep down the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul.

Compelled to deny and subject the body, what do I then but get me a pig and feedit, and scratch it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and to hear it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but the spirit demands virtue; and a pig, being the virtue of indulgence, satisfies the flesh and is winked at by the soul.

If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no less is he at times a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needs just such companionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as one finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom discoursing on the fourth dimension of things in general, I am prone to feel somewhat removed, at sea somewhat.

Then I go down and spread my arms along the fence and come to anchor with the pig.

Leafing

Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry. But keeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, it is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day in the year out into the woods—a whole day in the woods—with rake and sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.

Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig.

You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen. And, if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing, snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and zest enough to the labor.

But leafing like every other humble labor of our life here in the Hills of Hingham has its own reward,—and when you can say that of any labor you are speaking of its poetry.

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted years ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the winds have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.

We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.

You can yell all you want to when you go leafing, yell at every stump you hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the twigs, and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig. You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are; you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy capers you know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild woods and the noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays and the crows?

The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees; the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.

You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile, thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as if it were your own bed you were gathering—as really it is. He that rakes for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his own winter bed.

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms my heart.

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work for! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling and storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much better things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a number of objects that would never come within the range of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the rake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably gathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at the touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling out a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the white-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and high-bred-looking as greyhounds.

Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.

Listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we, too, hear a "fine, plaintive" sound—no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and toes, he is surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.

We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries—a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas table.

But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a woodchuck's—

"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig we want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."

Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it open, while two more stuff in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet, and pack the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the bulging bag.

Exciting? If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, and let us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt! Hold on to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look out for the stump! Isn't it fun to go leafing? Is n't it fun to do anything that your heart does with you?—even though you do it for a pig!

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can't weep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail. There is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of pure pig joy.

"Boosh! Boosh!" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short—the shortest stop!—and fall to rooting for acorns.

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-nose little porker of mine—ages and ages ago. But he still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep down within him.

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the forest for him—ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and of pig,roastpig. And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no less are we at times wild savages in our hearts.

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go leafing. I want to give my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a pen; I do not want to; but surely I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, did not escape now and then from my little penned-in, daily round into the wide, sweet woods, my ancestral home.

The little foxes

I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called out from the road:—

"Say, ain't they a litter of young foxes somewheres here in the ridges?"

I recognized the man as one of the chronic fox-hunters of the region, and answered:—

"I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has pestered my chickens lately."

"Well, she won't pester them no more. She 's been trapped and killed. Any man that would kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't. I 've hunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em." And he disappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest so utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I had had of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up the ridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of suckling foxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that spread in every direction about him. I did not see which way he went, for by the time I reached the crest he had gone on and out of hearing through the thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a stump to think about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way up and down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogs and up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour after hour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of little foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother did not return.

He found them—two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an open field, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse! I don't know how he found them. But patience and knowledge and love, and a wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of his primitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt. He took them, nursed them back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until they could forage for themselves, turned them loose in the woods, and then, that fall, he shot them one after the other as often as he had a holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night upon which he could hunt.

But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes were shot at my lower bars last winter. It is now strawberry time again, and again an old she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard fence—which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the ridges. The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun. For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human nature and in all nature—to preserve a remnant, that no line perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and smaller-growing globe of ours.

And it may continue so for ages yet, with our help and permission.

Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing line toward the chicken-yard.

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank like a great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have all but vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested. He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.

A few men with guns—for money—had done it. And the wild areas of the world, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited now that a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book of life, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet"—literally, and he must go softly now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed the last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida forests. So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently we have had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along the Gulf coast—so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does the mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!

With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, from these few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of the South and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest.

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while extinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in the future, a little help and constant help now will save even the largest of our animals for a long time to come.

The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and the power in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past belief until one has watched carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settled region.

The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It is somewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that there are probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than there were all told over all of North America when the white men first came here. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also been given protection—pens!

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution and repression, if given only a measure of protection.

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet life holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps himself successfully from the poultry of my careful raising.

Nature—man-nature—has been hard on the little brute—to save him! His face has grown long from much experience, and deep-lined with wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes in and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens within the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the earth.

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me tear down upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the road and trots upon his four adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of the henyard open.

There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse of the fox; no thought of Nature more reassuring than the thought of the way Reynard holds his own—of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Nature will put up when cornered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too small for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help of man, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that not for years yet need another animal form perish from the earth.

If I am assuming too much authority, it is because, here in the remoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of the distant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in this determined attempt to exterminate the fox. No, I do not raise fancy chickens in order to feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his coming. He knows it, and comes just the same. At least the gun does not keep him away. My neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him away. Guns, dogs, traps, poison—nothing can keep the foxes away.

It must have been about four o'clock the other morning when one of my children tiptoed into my room and whispered, "Father, there's the old fox walking around Pigeon-Henny's coop behind the barn."

I got up and hurried with the little fellow into his room, and sure enough, there in the fog of the dim morning I could make out the form of a fox moving slowly around the small coop.

The old hen was clucking in terror to her chicks, her cries having awakened the small boys.

I got myself down into the basement, seized my gun, and, gliding out through the cellar door, crept stealthily into the barn.

The back window was open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked down into the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but where was the fox?

Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun out across the window-sill, I waited.

Yes, there, through a rift in the fog, stood the fox! What a shot! The old rascal cocked his ears toward the house. All was still. Quickly under the wire of the coop went his paw, the old hen fluttering and crying in fresh terror.

Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of the gun around on the window-sill until the bead drew dead upon the thief. The cow in her stall beside me did not stir. I knew that four small boys in the bedroom window had their eyes riveted upon that fox waiting for me to fire. It was a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in the cold, white fog, and without anything much but slippers on. Usually, of course, I shot in boots.

But there stood the fox clawing out my young chickens, and, steadying the gun as best I could on the moving window-sill, I fired.

That the fox jumped is not to be wondered at. I jumped myself as both barrels went off together. A gun is a sudden thing any time of day, but so early in the morning, and when everything was wrapped in silence and the ocean fog, the double explosion was extremely startling.

I should have fired only one barrel, for the fox, after jumping, turned around and looked all over the end of the barn to see if the shooting were going to happen again. I wished then that I had saved the other barrel.

All I could do was to shout at him, which made him run off.

The boys wanted to know if I thought I had killed the hen. On going out later I found that I had not even hit the coop—not so bad a shot, after all, taking into account the size of the coop and the thick, distorting qualities of the weather.

There is no particular credit to the fox in this, nor do I come in for any particular credit this time; but the little drama does illustrate the chances in the game of life, chances that sometimes, usually indeed, are in favor of the fox.

He not only got away, but he also got away with eleven out of the twelve young chicks in that brood. He had dug a hole under the wire of the coop, then, by waiting his chance, or by frightening the chicks out, had eaten all of them but one.

That he escaped this time was sheer luck; that he got his breakfast before escaping was due to his cunning. And I have seen so many instances of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes wide open, I could believe him almost as wise as he was thought to be in the olden days of fable and folk-lore. How cool and collected he can be, too!

One day last autumn I was climbing the steep ridge behind the mowing-field when I heard a fox-hound yelping over in the hollow beyond. Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw the hound off below me on the side of the parallel ridge across the valley. He was beating slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and evidently having a hard time holding the trail. Now and then he would throw his head up into the air and howl, a long, doleful howl, as if in protest, begging the fox to stop its fooling and play fair.

The hound was walking, not running, and at a gait almost as deliberate as his howl. Round and round in one place he would go, off this way, off that, then back, until, catching the scent again, or in despair of ever hitting it (I don't know which), he would stand stock-still and howl.

That the hound was tired I felt sure; but that he was on the trail of a fox I could not believe; and I was watching him curiously when something stirred on the top of the ridge almost beside me.

Without turning so much as my head, I saw the fox, a beautiful creature, going slowly round and round in a circle—in a figure eight, rather—among the bushes; then straight off it went and back; off again in another direction and back; then in and out, round and round, utterly without hurry, until, taking a long leap down the steep hillside, the wily creature was off at an easy trot.

The hound did know what he was about. Across the valley, up the ridge, he worked his sure way, while I held my breath at his accuracy. Striking the woven circle at the top of the ridge, he began to weave in and out, back and forth, sniffling and whimpering like a tired child, beating gradually out into a wider and wider circle, and giving the fox all the rest it could want, before taking up the lead again and following on down the trail.

The hound knew what he was about; but so did the fox: the latter, moreover, taking the initiative, inventing the trick, leading the run, and so in the end not only escaping the hound, but also vastly widening the distance between their respective wits and abilities.

I recently witnessed a very interesting instance of this superiority of the fox. One of the best hunters in my neighborhood, a man widely known for the quality of his hounds, sold a dog, Gingles, an extraordinarily fine animal, to a hunter in a near-by town. The new owner brought his dog down here to try him out.

The hound was sent into the woods and was off in a moment on a warm trail. But it was not long before the baying ceased, and shortly after, back came the dog. The new owner was disappointed; but the next day he returned and started the dog again, only to have the same thing happen, the dog returning in a little while with a sheepish air of having been fooled. Over and over the trial was made, when, finally, the dog was taken back to its trainer as worthless.

Then both men came out with the dog, the trainer starting him on the trail and following on after him as fast as he could break his way through the woods. Suddenly, as in the trials before, the baying ceased, but before the baffled dog had had time to grow discouraged, the men came up to find him beating distractedly about in a small, freshly burned area among the bushes, his nose full of strong ashes, the trail hopelessly lost. With the help of the men the fox was dislodged, and the dog carried him on in a course that was to his new owner's entire satisfaction.

The fox jumped into the ashes to save himself. Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I have taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but, beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, some seventy species of wild things—thirty-six in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning in the muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in scales, four in shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, salamanders)—seventy-five in all.

Here is a multiple life going serenely and abundantly on in an environment whose utter change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated by phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in the heart of the ancient woods to a joist close up against the hot roof of my pigpen behind the barn. From this very joist, however, she has already brought off two broods since March, one of four and one of five.

As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be as long as the human race endures, why should not the line of phoebes also endure? The case of the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more room than a pigpen; but as long as the domestic hen endures, if we will but give the fox half the chance we give to phoebe, he too shall endure.

I had climbed the footpath from the meadow late one autumn evening, and stood leaning back upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and listening to the hounds baying in the swamp far away to the west of me. You have heard at night the passing of a train beyond the mountains; the creak of thole-pins round a distant curve in the river; the closing of a barn door somewhere down the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds was another such friendly and human voice calling across the vast of the night.

How clear their cries and bell-like! How mellow in the distance, ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, round the sides of a swinging silver bell! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, the sound rising and falling through the rolling woodland and spreading like a curling wave as the pack broke into the open over the level meadows.

I caught myself picking out the individual voices as they spoke, for an instant, singly and unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as the chase swept unhindered across the meadows.

What was that? A twig that broke, some brittle oak leaf that cracked in the path behind me! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded feet came up the path, as something stopped, breathed, came on—as into the moonlight, beyond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked the fox.

The dogs were now very near and coming as swift as their eager legs could carry them. But I was standing still, so still that the fox did not recognize me as anything more than a stump.

No, I was more than a stump; that much he saw immediately. But how much more than a stump?

The dogs were coming. But what was I? The fox was curious, interested, and after trying to make me out from a distance, crept gingerly up and sniffed at my shoes!

But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in the dew of the meadow and seemed to tell him little. So he backed off, and sat down upon his tail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch me. He might have outwatched me, though I kept amazingly still, but the hounds were crashing through the underbrush below, and he must needs be off. Getting carefully up, he trotted first this side of me, then that, for a better view, then down the path up which he had just come, and into the very throat of the panting clamor, when, leaping lightly aside over a pile of brush and stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly about me.

Cool? It was iced! And it was a revelation to me of what may be the mind of Nature. I have never seen anything in the woods, never had a glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has given me so much confidence in the possibility of a permanent alliance between human life and wild life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly various animal forms in the midst of spreading farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of the fox.

At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable always of taking every advantage. She is not yet past the panic, and probably never will be; but no one can watch the change of age-long habits in the wild animals, their ready adaptability, their amazing resourcefulness, with any very real fears for what civilization may yet have in store for them so long as our superior wit is for, instead of against, them.

I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when only my helping hand could have saved; but the circumstances have seldom been due to other than natural causes—very rarely man-made. On the contrary, man-made conditions out of doors—the multiplicity of fences, gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest or prairie—are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wild life (except for the larger forms), because all of this means more kinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more paths and short cuts and chances for escape—all things that help preserve life.

One morning, about two weeks ago, I was down by the brook along the road, when I heard a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the woods all night, bearing down in my direction.

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edges beaded, the grass blades bent with wet, so that instead of creeping into the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the road to the steep gravel bank, climbed it and sat down, well out of sight, but where I could see a long stretch of the road.

On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the road at the spot where the trout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross—and there he stood!

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and was gone.

He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat full of water, his big brush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew. He was running a race burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suit of water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the open road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet grass and thicket that had clogged his long course.

On came the dogs, very close upon him; and I turned again to the bend in the brook to see them strike the road, when, flash, below me on the road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust, the fox!—back into the very jaws of the hounds!—Instead he broke into the tangle of grapevines out of which he had first come, just as the pack broke into the road frombehindthe mass of thick, ropy vines.

Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with a burst of noise and speed that carried them through the cut below me in a howling gale, a whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on.

Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed had carried them on beyond the point where the fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail, on so far that though I waited several minutes, not one of the dogs had discovered the trick to come back on the right lead.

If I had had agun! Yes, but I did not. But if Ihadhad a gun, it might have made no particular difference. Yet it is the gun that makes the difference—all the difference between much or little wild life—life that our groves and fields may have at our hands now, as once the forests and prairies had it directly from the hands of the Lord.

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