Vol. XXin Recent Literature. 87 



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RECENT LITERATURE. 



Walton's ' A Hermit's Wild Friends.' ^ — As a popular work on out-of 

 door 'wild things' this collection of well-intentioned sketches will doubt- 

 less meet with many admirers, being printed on heavy paper in large 

 type, with broad-margined pages embellished profusely with marginal 

 cuts, and copiously illustrated with full-page plates, many of them after 

 drawings by Fuertes, and others by Kennedy, with still others that 

 have seen previous service. It is written, however, with a know-it-all 

 cocksureness that only lack of knowledge ever prompts, and doubtless no 

 amount of proof of error in the author's statements would in the slightest 

 degree affect his attitude in the case. The author's "eighteen years of her- 

 mit life" in the woods on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, have given him 

 opportunity for intimate acquaintance with the birds, small mammals 

 and reptiles to be found in such localities, and he evidently knows them 

 well. It is therefore the greater pity that through his wealth of imagi- 

 nation and predilection for humanizing his birds and mice and squirrels he 

 should, perhaps unconsciously and therefore without dishonest motive, 

 so often turn his sketches into incredible natural history romances. It 

 would take too much space to itemize this general charge, but in the case 

 of 'Wabbles,' a male Song Sparrow, alleged to have lived in his imme- 

 diate neighborhood for ^^ fourteen years," and "eleven years with his 



second wife," we begin to wonder if the author knows the size of a No. 4 

 shot, a no inconsiderable pellet of lead he claims to have removed from 

 "the muscle of the wing-joint" of 'Wabbles' when he first made his 

 acquaintance. If he had been satisfied to call it a No. 10, or even a No. 

 8, it would take less imagination to conceive of its arrest by and lodg- 

 ment in "the muscle of the wing-joint" of a Song Sparrow. And we could 

 then have been better prepared to take a little stock in Wabbles's setting 

 up a little family singing school and teaching "his boys to sing the 

 mating-song of his species"; and also that on one tenth day of March, 

 twelve years before the close of the author's related association with 

 Wabbles, he might have "brought with him from the South a male 

 linnet," and that "a week later Mrs. Wabbles returned, and with her was 

 the mate of the linnet," in consequence of these four birds having "met 

 in the South," and because : "In the course of bird gossip either the lin- 

 nets or sparrows had announced that the summer home was on Cape 

 Ann." In this romance of Wabbles a series of events is narrated with 

 all the seriousness of positive knowledge, yet many of them are of such 



1 A Hermit's Wild Friends, or Eighteen Years in the Woods. By Mason 

 A. Walton (The Hermit of Gloucester). Boston : Dana Estes and Company, 

 Publishers. "Published October, 1903." 8vo, pp. i-x, 11-304, with numer- 

 ous full-page illustrations and text-cuts. 



