THE ALERT EYE. 17 



makes the alert eye. All of us see those things 

 that we are interested in. Why did not the man 

 who has just emerged from the woods, see a single 

 bird or hear a single note of bird minstrelsy ? Be- 

 cause his mind was otherwise occupied. And so 

 the nuthatch called H^^nk-a^ henk-a^ the titmouse 

 chirped its Chick-a-da-da^ and the brown creeper 

 lisped its piercing Ts-e-e-e^ ts-e-e-e^ but the man's 

 dull ear caught no welcoming salute, and his lack- 

 luster eye saw no transit of pinions across his path. 

 There are many persons whose minds need to be 

 awakened to an appreciation of nature, and that is 

 one of the purposes of this unpretending volume. 

 If the hearts of the young could be stirred to a 

 love of nature, and their minds aroused to stud}^ 

 her, much would be done toward solving some of 

 the perplexing social problems of the day. 



Closely akin to the unseeing eye is the unbeliev- 

 ing mind ; at 0.II events, the kinship is sufficiently 

 close to justify a brief notice in a paper that does 

 not pretend to be a philosophic discussion. Here 

 and there you will find persons who are always 

 skeptical of the statements of the naturalist, espe- 

 cially if he describes some occurrence unheard-of 

 before, or not found in '* the books ; " and usually 

 the ground for their demur is that they themselves 



