COMMUTER'S WIFE 181 



the convenient Bohn edition of the " Chronicles of 

 Mathew of Westminster," " Florence of Worcester," 

 " Roger de Hovenden," " Ingulph," and the " Ven- 

 erable Bede," besides Plutarch's " Lives," and the 

 ponderous volumes of Schoolcraft upon our own In- 

 dians, from whom I then fancied myself descended. 

 Natural history and the poetical side of nature 

 came later. Figuier's works and Emerson's " Trees 

 and Shrubs of Massachusetts " hovered about my 

 seventeenth birthday with a bevy of bird books. It 

 had never before seemed any more necessary for me 

 to locate the birds, with which I was wholly familiar 

 and which were my field companions, and analyze 

 them by means of books, than to search the town 

 records for statistics concerning my neighbours whose 

 habits and daily lives were open to me. The next 

 year I met Thoreau quite informally, though he had 

 always been within easy reach, like the near neigh- 

 bour upon whom it is so easy to call that we put it 

 off, and Wilson Flagg went with me to the attic on 

 rainy summer days in guise of " Woods and By- 

 ways of New England," and its companion " Birds 

 and Seasons," while Burroughs and Hamilton Gib- 

 son were as a pair of rose-coloured glasses through 

 which I learned at once to differentiate and to beau- 

 tify everyday things, though far back two books 



