44 LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY 



One season I was interested in the tree-frogs, es- 

 pecially the tiny piper that one hears about the 

 woods and brushy fields, — the hyla of the swamps 

 become a denizen of the trees ; I had never seen him 

 in this new role. But this season, having hylas in 

 mind, or rather being ripe for them, I several times 

 came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some 

 bushes, I captured two. They leaped before me, as 

 doubtless they had done many times before ; but though 

 I was not looking for or thinking of them, yet they 

 were quickly recognized, because the eye had been 

 commissioned to find them. On another occasion, 

 not long afterward, I was hurriedly loading my gun 

 in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a gray 

 squirrel that was fast escaping through the treetops, 

 when one of these lilliput frogs, the color of the 

 fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me. I saw him 

 only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged 

 him, because I had already made him my own. 



Nevertheless the habit of observation is the habit 

 of clear and decisive gazing: not by a first casual 

 glance, but by a steady, deliberate aim of the eye, are 

 the rare and characteristic things discovered. You 

 must look intently, and hold your eye firmly to the 

 spot, to see more than do the rank and file of man- 

 kind. The sharpshooter picks out his man, and 

 knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a 

 rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well 

 to locate, not only form, color, weight, etc., in the 

 region of the eye, but a faculty which they call in- 

 dividuality, — that which separates, discriminates, 



