THE LURE OF FIELD WORK 67 



to facilitate my work; so I now have a library, 

 dark-room, and a printing room, shut from the 

 remainder of the Cabin, where I may work in se- 

 clusion. This I call Limberlost Cabin, north; 

 the other, south. 



I have had many unusual and inexplainable ex- 

 periences afield. I have come to know the birds 

 more intimately and to understand their ways 

 better than those of my fellow men, with whom 

 I have had no such contact. So if some of the 

 happenings I record are not within the knowledge 

 and experience of my readers I ask that before my 

 veracity is questioned or an attempt is made to 

 controvert the conclusions I draw, my lifetime of 

 personal experience with the birds be taken into 

 consideration, and that if I am to be questioned, 

 the questioning be done by those who have had a 

 like amount of similar experience. Naturally, 

 I feel that having lived with and among the birds 

 in such intimacy as to secure really characteristic 

 pictures which exhibit the very human attributes 

 of joy, grief, pain, fear, greed, suspicion, and the 

 like, I should not be questioned except by those 

 sufficiently intimate with the birds to have se- 

 cured similar reproductions of them. I make no 

 apology for any incident I introduce. In some 

 cases I can offer incontrovertible proof by reliable 

 witnesses, but very frequently my unsupported 

 word must suffice, as of necessity in the more 

 intimate and characteristic of these studies I have 



