THE TIDE HAS TURNED oto 
Still didst thou come from lands afar 
In childhood days as now, — 
Yet alien as the planets are, 
And elfin-strange art thou. 
Thy little realm of quick delights, 
Fierce instincts, untaught powers — 
What unimagined days and nights 
Cut off that realm from ours! 
Thy soul is of the dawn of Earth, 
And thine the secrets be 
Of sentient being’s far-off birth 
And round-eyed infancy. 
With thee, beneath our sheltering roof, 
The starry Sphinx doth dwell, 
Untamed, eternally aloof 
And inaccessible ! 
— Dora READ GOODALE. 
THE RUBY-THROATED HUMMING-BIRD 
“The last and least of the four-winged mysteries is 
also the smallest of our birds, lacking a quarter of being 
four inches long. But it does not need size to proclaim 
its beauty any more than a glowing ruby or emerald; 
and indeed it wears both of these gems, the one on its 
throat and the other on its back. Its world is the garden 
where everything is brightest, its food nectar, and such 
little aphis as gather in it, and its home lashed by cobwebs 
to a slender branch, a fairy nest of plant, wool, and lichens, 
soft as feather down, wherein lie two eggs, white and 
opaque and glistening like some fresh-water pearls. 
