The Birds' Calendar 



notes coursing up and down, now high in air, 

 now skimming the water, — the perpetual rural- 

 ist finds nothing in these commonplace occur- 

 rences worth the mention (quite likely he does 

 not see them) ; but the gilded shops of the city 

 do not contain their equal. Nature never 

 strains for an effect — we often fail to realize she 

 has made an effect until we recall the scene — 

 she has no display-windows for ]ie7- wares. Her 

 beauty eludes rather than seeks observation, 

 seeming to exist quite as a matter of course, and 

 for its own sake, without a thought whether a 

 human eye sees and admires or not, but every- 

 thing in its sort perfect, without a front side 

 and a back side, which is man's confession of a 

 low standard. 



In pastoral scenery Nature's chef-d^ oeiivre is 

 the cow. Mr. Burroughs calls it '' our rural di- 

 vinity;" — gentle, guileless, honest, and un- 

 worldly, how the clumsy, patient beast embodies 

 the chief attractive qualities of that childhood 

 of which it is the great nourisher the world over. 

 And I believe, too, there is more honest, homely 

 sense of the beauty of nature in those great, mild 

 eyes of the cow — the serene, benevolent, equani- 

 mous cow — than in any other animal. As has 

 been said of Wisdom, so we may say of her, 



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