The Birds' Calendar 



notes coursing up and down, now high in air, 

 now skimming the water, the perpetual rural- 

 ist finds nothing in these commonplace occur- 

 rences worth the mention (quite likely he does 

 not see them) ; but the gilded shops of the city 

 do not contain their equal. Nature never 

 strains for an efect\ve often fail to realize she 

 has made an effect until we recall the scene 

 she has no display-windows for her wares. Her 

 beauty eludes rather than seeks observation, 

 seeming to exist quke as a matter of course, and 

 for its own sake, without a thought whether a 

 human eye sees and admires or not, but every- 

 thing in its sort perfect, without a front side 

 and a back side, which is man's confession of a 

 low standard. 



In pastoral scenery Nature's chef-d' ceuvre is 

 the cow. Mr. Burroughs calls it " our rural di- 

 vinity;" gentle, guileless, honest, and un- 

 worldly, how the clumsy, patient beast embodies 

 the chief attractive qualities of that childhood 

 of which it is the great nourisher the world over. 

 And I believe, too, there is more honest, homely 

 sense of the beauty of nature in those great, mild 

 eyes of the cow the serene, benevolent, equani- 

 mous cow than in any other animaf. As has 

 been said of Wisdom, so we may say of her, 



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