258 What Birds Have Done With Me 



listen if they had heard Barnaby Rudge's Raven 

 saying: "I'm a Devil, I'm a Devil, I'm a Devil." 

 The glib talk of volumes, ignoring characters, 

 seemed most vague and unsatisfactory, as though 

 some one was setting up to have acquired a thor- 

 ough knowledge of China by memorizing the 

 names of all the different kinds of tea grown in 

 that country. 



The veil of a temple has been rent and you are 

 being admitted into a Holy of Holies when the 

 barrier of fear between you and forms of wild life 

 is rolled up like a scroll, and you become friends 

 and comrades. 



Is it not a shameful thing that man, the image 

 of his Maker, is an object of terror to his little 

 brothers of the field and forest? Among unnum- 

 bered monsters, there is nothing else that inspires 

 such universal fear, such a mad frenzy of appre- 

 hension. They will complain that they found the 

 game wild. Which is the wilder, the hunted or the 

 hunters? These wild things so relentlessly pur- 

 sued to their death were naturally tame and full 

 of confidence till man made of himself a "scare- 

 crow" a shamming presentiment of evil. 



In the September "Recreation" there is a pic- 

 ture of a man, sitting on the ground, a grouse 

 perched on his arm. Though often found near 

 human habitations, it is reckoned among our wild- 

 est birds. A lonely U. S. mail carrier, in a bit of 



