A SHARP LOOKOUT. 5 



and as they swayed a little this way and that, they 

 suggested a slender, all but invisible, aerial serpent 

 cleaving the ether. What a highway was pointed 

 out up there ! an easy grade from the Gulf to Hud- 

 son's Bay. 



Then the typical spring and summer and autumn 

 days, of all shades and complexions, one cannot af- 

 ford to miss any of them, and when looked out upon 

 from one's own spot of earth, how much more beauti- 

 ful and significant they are ! Nature comes home to 

 one most when he is at home ; the stranger and the 

 traveler finds her a stranger and a traveler also. One's 

 own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying 

 part of himself ; he has sowed himself broadcast upon 

 it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings ; he is 

 sensitive to the verge of the horizon : cut those trees, 

 and he bleeds ; mar those hills, and he suffers. How 

 has the farmer planted himself in his fields ; builded 

 himself into his stone walls, and evoked the sympathy 

 of the hills by his struggle ! This home feeling, this 

 domestication of nature, is important to the observer. 

 This is the bird-lime with which he catches the bird ; 

 this is the private door that admits him behind the 

 scenes. This is one source of Gilbert White's charm, 

 and of the charm of Thoreau's " Walden." 



The birds that come about one's door in winter, or 

 that build in his trees in summer, what a peculiar in- 

 terest they have ! What crop have I sowed in Flor- 

 ida or in California, that I should go there to reap ? 

 I should be only a visitor, or formal caller upon nature, 



