€^e ;Ba^ of t^t &Ck\xb 



wrote one of these new nature students, who hap- 

 pened also to be a college student, " and we went 

 for our usual Saturday's birding into the woods. 

 The chestnuts were ripe, and we gathered a peck 

 between us. On our way home, we discovered a 

 small bird perched upon a cedar tree with a worm in 

 its beak. It was a hummingbird, and after a little 

 searching we found its tiny nest close up against the 

 trunk of the cedar, full of tiny nestlings just ready 

 to fly/' 



This is what they find, many of these who are 

 caught up by the movement toward the fields ; but 

 not all of them. A little five-year-old from the village 

 came out to see me recently, and while playing in the 

 orchard she brought me five flowers, called them by 

 their right names, and told me how they grew. Down 

 in the loneliest marshes of Delaware Bay I know a 

 lighthouse keeper and his solitary neighbor, a farmer : 

 both have been touched by this nature spirit ; both 

 are interested, informed, and observant. The farmer 

 there, on the old Zane's Place, is no man of books, like 

 the rector of Selborne, but he is a man of birds and 

 beasts, of limitless marsh and bay and sky, of ever- 

 lasting silence and wideness and largeness and eter- 



ii6 



