The Bay of he Band 
at all. He slinks from some abandoned burrow, and, 
if the owl and mink are not watching, dies alone in 
the grass, and we rarely know. 
I shall never forget the impression made upon me 
by those quiet bones. It was like that made by my 
first visit to a great city hospital,—out of the busy, 
cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the sick 
and injured lay in long white lines. We tramp the 
woods and meadows and never step from the sweet 
air and the pure sunlight of health into a hospital. 
But that is not because no sick, ill-formed, or in- 
jured are there. The proportion is smaller than 
among us humans, and for very good reasons, yet 
there is much real suffering, and to come upon it, as 
we will, now and then, must certainly quicken our 
understanding and deepen our sympathy with the 
life out of doors. 
No sensible person could for a moment believe 
the animals capable of suffering as a human being 
can suffer, or that there is any such call for our 
sympathy from them as from our human neighbors. 
But an unselfish sharing of the life of the fields de- 
mands that we take part in all of it, — and all of it is 
but little short of tragedy. Nature wears a brave 
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