UNDER THE MAPLES 



being enacted every day before his very eyes in 

 his own garden and dooryard and apple-orchard 

 and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and 

 sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one 

 rides or walks or sits under the trees, or loiters 

 about the fields or woods, the play of wild life is 

 going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed 

 with the seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available 

 for his instruction and entertainment. On every 

 farm in the land a volume of live natural history 

 goes to waste every year because there is no his- 

 torian to note the happenings. 



The drama of wild life goes on more or less be- 

 hind screens a screen of leaves or of grass, or of 

 vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert and 

 sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us 

 see only a mere fraction of it. If one saw one tenth 

 of the significant happenings that take place on his 

 few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the 

 course of the season, or even of a single week, what 

 a harvest he would have! The drama of wild life 

 is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the stage 

 before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other 

 stages. 



I wonder how many of the scores of persons pass- 

 ing along the road between my place and the rail- 

 way station one early May day became aware that 

 a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees 

 over their heads. It was the annual sdngerfest of 



40 



