A SHARP LOOKOUT 3 



they moved, when the birds came into my field of 

 vision. I should never have seen them had they 

 not crossed the precise spot upon which my eye was 

 fixed. As it -was near sundown, they were proba- 

 bly launched for an all-night pull. They were 

 going with great speed, and as they swayed a little 

 this way and that, they suggested a slender, all but 

 invisible, aerial serpent cleaving the ether. What 

 a highway was pointed out up there ! — an easy 

 grade from the Gulf to Hudson's Bay. 



Then the typical spring and summer and autumn 

 days, of all shades and complexions, — one cannot 

 afford to miss any of them; and when looked out 

 upon from one's own spot of earth, how much more 

 beautiful and significant they are! Nature comes 

 home to one most when he is at home; the stranger 

 and traveler finds her a stranger and a traveler 

 also. One's own landscape comes in time to be a 

 sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed him- 

 self broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods 

 and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the 

 horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those 

 hills, and he suffers. How has the farmer planted 

 himself in his fields ; builded himself into his stone 

 walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his 

 struggle ! This home feeling, this domestication 

 of nature, is important to the observer. This is 

 the bird-lime with which he catches the bird; this 

 is the private door that admits him behind the 

 scenes. This is one source of Gilbert "White's 

 charm, and of the charm of Thoreau's "Walden." ' 



