98 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



man once reaped his hard-won harvests, and now 

 reaps no more. 



Yet it is harvested daily by the four-footed and 

 flying creatures of the wilderness, and the human culti- 

 vation once expended upon it has made it the richer 

 farm for them. They toil not, neither do they sow, yet 

 they live well on a varied if vegetarian diet. They reap 

 as the fancy strikes them in man's abandoned clearing. 



There is so much to see in our pasture, so much to in- 

 fer! It is so quiet, so delicately melancholy with its 

 suggestion of a vanished race of New England pioneers, 

 so lovely with its woods and spring, such a busy res- 

 taurant for the birds by day, with music furnished by 

 the patrons, and by night a restaurant, too, always 

 open, with no police restrictions, though we be not here 

 to see. To take morning reckoning of last night's 

 visitors, especially by their tracks hi the snow, is one of 

 the lesser but unfailing delights of woodcraft. 



Birds are busy creatures, for all they find so much 

 time to sing, and they pay a great deal more attention 

 to their stomachs than the poets ever mention. You 

 will come closer to the facts in those government 

 bulletins which report the finding of two thousand mos- 

 quitoes in the stomach of a single martin, and similar 

 interesting discoveries, than in the poet's pages. I 

 don't know that I have ever seen it computed how many 

 raspberries a catbird can eat, but I know it is more than 

 I can spare from the vines in my own garden, where a 



