LEAF AND TENDRIL 



kingfisher lives upon fish, and he always seizes them 

 with his beak and swallows them head foremost. 



Any testimony the value of which depends upon 

 accuracy in seeing needs to be well sifted, so few 

 persons see straight and see whole. They see a part, 

 and then guess or fancy the rest. I have read that 

 the Scotch fishermen will tell you that the loon 

 carries its egg under its wing till it hatches. One 

 would say they are in a position to know; their 

 occupations bring them often into the haunts of 

 the loon; yet the notion is entirely erroneous. The 

 loon builds a nest and incubates its eggs upon the 

 ground as surely as does the goose or duck. 



Not till the mind is purged of dread, superstition, 

 and all notions of a partnership between the visible 

 and the occult will the eye see straight. The mind 

 that is athirst for the marvelous and the mysterious 

 will rarely see straight. The mind that believes the 

 wild creatures are half human, that they plot and 

 plan and reason as men do, will not see straight, 

 or report the facts without addition or diminution. 

 There is plenty that is curious and inexplicable in 

 nature, things that astonish or baffle us, but there is 

 no " hocus-pocus," nothing that moves on the bor- 

 der-land between the known and the unknown, or 

 that justifies the curious superstitions of the past. 

 Things of the twilight are more elusive and difficult 

 of verification than things of the noon, but they are 

 no less real, and no less a part of the common day. 

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