XIII 

 A HAY-BARN IDYL 



EVERY farm boy knows how much wild life 

 ebbs and flows about a country hay-barn the 

 whole year round. It is a point in the landscape 

 where the wild and the domestic meet. The foxes 

 prowl around it in winter, the squirrels visit it, mice 

 and rats make their homes in it, and cut their roads 

 through the hay. In summer swallows, phcebe- 

 birds, and robins love to shelter their nests be- 

 neath its roof, bumblebees build their rude combs 

 in the abandoned mice-nests, and yellow-jackets 

 often hang their paper habitations from its timbers. 

 For several summers, as I have said in a former 

 chapter, I have had my study in one of these 

 empty or partly filled hay-barns on the farm where 

 I was born, and the wild life about me that used 

 to interest me as a boy now engages me as a stu- 

 dent and observer of outdoor nature. While I am 

 busy with my books and my writing, the birds are 

 busy with their nest-building or brood-rearing. Now, 

 in early July, a pair of barn swallows have a nest 

 in the peak at one end, and a pair of phoebe-birds 

 have a nest in the peak at the other end. The 

 phcebes, remembering perhaps their ill luck last 

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