20 THE IDYL OF THE SPLIT-BAMBOO 



vated road which affright the ear? The harshest 

 note that breaks the stillness here is the boom of the 

 bittern in the distant marsh. Home to camp the 

 fisherman goes, taking a cast in this silent pool in 

 which the trout rose in the forenoon to his cast but 

 missed the fly, or in that dark hole deep under the 

 bank in which a vigilant eye may detect the brown 

 sides of a trout with lazily waving fins and tail 

 an old campaigner not easily caught. 



" So the shades of evening find the ramble ended, 

 and no harsher beams than the soft radiance of the 

 stars or the gentle spark of the fireflies and the glow- 

 worm light the wayfarer to his repose. 



" There are other incentives which are able to 

 make the haunts of wild things attractive. To a 

 man who has walked through the woods for exercise 

 much as he would saw wood by a woodpile, a walk 

 through the tangled paths with a naturalist is both 

 an astonishment and a revelation. A few years ago 

 popular works on nature-study were things un- 

 known. The only means of information for the 

 inquiring amateur were purely technical; works such 

 as Gray's Botany, to a beginner as uninteresting and 

 difficult as a work on differential calculus. Now there 

 are whole libraries of books which are both interest- 

 ing, popular and true to the scientific facts. 2 There 



2 The interested reader will do well to investigate the very inexpensive 

 Chester A. Reed flower and bird pocket-guides, illustrated in color; Mrs. 

 Dana's How to Know the Wild Flowers, and How to Know the Ferns; 

 the Chapman bird books; Collins and Preston's Key to the Trees; Julia 

 Ellen Roger's Tree Guide; Keeler's Our Native Trees; F. Schuyler Mathews* 



