10 Henshaw, In Mcmoriam: William Brewster. [j" n 



greatly admired shapely oaks and stately pines, and cut many 

 vistas through his woods so as to bring into prominent view trees 

 whose glories otherwise would have been hidden. He also took 

 great pleasure in transplanting to his woods rare shrubs and flower- 

 ing plants from contiguous localities, or from remote parts of the 

 State, and they rooted and grew into his very fiber and became a 

 part of him. He visited them often, and always as shrines before 

 which he gave praise and offered worship. 



He also cultivated about the house garden-flowers of the old 

 fashioned type, of which he was very fond. Naturally he was very 

 successful with them, so that most of the summer the old home 

 borrowed the freshness of youth from the blaze of floral color around 

 it. It was down the old cow lane back of the house, resplendent on 

 either side with asters, golden rods, and various flowering shrubs, 

 that William most delighted to walk. The lane opened into a 

 winding woodland path which led to the "birch pasture," a favor- 

 ite resort of the migrating warblers, and he said that, though he 

 followed this path daily, and sometimes several times a day, he 

 never tired of it, and that it was always as fresh in his eyes as if 

 newly discovered. 



But none of the things mentioned appealed to Brewster's inter- 

 est as strongly as the birds, and the chief value of the place to 

 naturalists rests upon the bird notes he made here. Nowhere else 

 was the same experiment with bird life ever tried, at least for an 

 equal length of time. For twenty years no gun was ever fired on 

 October Farm, nor a bird or mammal ever molested by man. 

 Hawks, crows, bluejays, skunks, foxes and other birds and beasties, 

 if not equally welcome in Brewster's eyes, were never molested. 

 Each lived its own life according to its instincts, and Nature was 

 allowed to work out her own problem in her own way. Beyond 

 providing boxes for the hole-building species to nest in and planting 

 seed plants for their sustenance, Brewster interfered with them not 

 at all. 



The results will surprise many. They certainly surprised Brew- 

 ster. For, at the expiration of some twenty years, there were 

 apparently as many birds on the place as there were at the begin- 

 ning of the experiment, but no more. True, there had been changes 

 in the distribution of the species, since the brushy haunts of the 



