266 What Birds Have Done With Me 



all out of doors is fairly bathed in the benedic- 

 tion of "Mighty God." The Bird Kingdom is 

 free from our conventional abuses and there 

 climbers excite neither envy nor disgust. Excus- 

 ing considerable digression, we come back to the 

 real unhampered joy of bird friends where rela- 

 tions are cordial but never too intimate. 



Without being too personal I have been tell- 

 ing you about some of these friends in earlier chap- 

 ters. I have not really attempted to tell you how 

 strong has been my attachment to some of these 

 close friends, for has not the great poet of human- 

 ity, Shakespeare, warned us that "I would love 

 but little if I could tell how much." 



Following along the unknown pathway not only 

 led me to the birds themselves, but into that 

 great department of our literature that pertains to 

 birds, rich, ample, and of absorbing interest. What 

 a surprise it was to find the trails blazed from 

 an early day, Aristotle and Pliny being volumin- 

 ous writers on the subject and a part of it being 

 good natural history today, the rest of a charac- 

 ter that even Herodotus would have chronicled 

 as having been a rumor over in Ethiopia. For 

 years, we were not occasional callers at the homes 

 of Frank M. Chapman, Mabel Osgood Wright 

 and Neltje Blanchan, but steady boarders, and 

 according to the customs of rural school teachers, 

 in an early day, we boarded around, and Chester 



