LEAF AND TENDRIL 



tions of others. You may not see just what I do in 

 the lives of the birds or the quadrupeds, but you 

 will see that which belongs to the same order of 

 facts, just as you will in the world of physics. You 

 will not see iron floating and wood sinking under 

 like conditions, or trees growing with their roots in 

 the air. You may see to-day something in the life 

 of a bird, or a bee, or a beast, that neither I nor 

 any one else ever saw before, but it will belong to 

 the same order of things that I and others have . 

 seen these creatures do. You will not see a wood- 

 chuck hanging to a limb by his tail like a possum, 

 nor a fox sleeping in the top of a tree like a coon, 

 nor a loon running a race between lines of inter- 

 ested spectators, nor crows hoarding trinkets in 

 a hollow stump, nor the old teaching their young 

 this or that, and so on. No, you may send a thoi*- 

 sand good observers to the woods every day for 

 a thousand years, and not one of them will see any 

 of the novel and surprising, not to say impossible, 

 things of which the "nature fakers" see so many 

 every time they take a walk. The nature faker's 

 fantastic natural history is not verifiable. I have 

 seen blackbirds build their nests in the side of an os- 

 prey's nest, and all seemed to go well — the osprey 

 is exclusively a fish-eater — but if any person were 

 to tell me that he had seen them build their nests 

 alongside of that of the eagle or the hen-hawk, or 

 that he had seen bluebirds breeding in a cavity with 

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