A SHARP LOOKOUT 3 



they moved, when the birds came into my field of 

 vision. I should never have seen them had they 

 not crossed the precise spot upon which my eye was 

 fixed. As it was near sundown, they were proba- 

 bly launched for an all-night pull. They were 

 going with great speed, 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 Hudson's Bay. 



Then the typical spring and summer and autumn 

 days, of all shades and complexions, — one cannot 

 afford to miss any of them; and when looked out 

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

 beautiful and significant they are! Nature comes 

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

 and 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 him- 

 self 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." 



