138 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
in my hand and crush its life out, yet I cannot 
gain its secret thus, and the centre of its con- 
sciousness is really farther from mine than the 
remotest planetary orbit. ‘We do not stead- 
ily bear in mind,” says Darwin, with a noble 
humility, “how profoundly ignorant we are of 
the condition of existence of every animal.” 
What sympathetic penetration can fathom 
the life, for instance, of yonder mysterious, 
almost voiceless, Hummingbird, smallest of 
feathery things, and loneliest ; whirring among 
birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird-like ; 
his path untraceable, his home unseen? An 
image of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems 
as if there were nothing joyous in him. He 
seems like some exiled pygmy prince, banished, 
but still regal, and doomed to wings. Did gems 
turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long, 
past dynasty of the Hummingbirds? It is 
strange to come upon his tiny nest, in some 
gray and tangled swamp, with this brilliant 
atom perched disconsolately near it, upon some 
mossy twig; it is like visiting Cinderella among 
her ashes. And from Hummingbird to Eagle, 
the daily existence of every bird is a remote 
and bewitching mystery. 
Pythagoras has been charged, both before 
and since the days of Malvolio, with holding 
that “the soul of our grandam might haply in- 
