The Lay of the Band 
to Thoreau, Emerson, and Burroughs, who can find 
nature, as well as birds and trees, who can think and 
feel as well as wonder and look. Before we can think 
and feel we must get over our wondering, and we 
must get entirely used to looking. This we are slowly 
doing, — slowly, I say, for it is the monstrous, the 
marvelous, the unreal that most of us still go out 
into the wilderness for to see, — bears and wolves, 
foxes, eagles, orioles, salmon, mustangs, porcupines 
of extraordinary parts and powers. 
There came to my desk, tied up with the same 
string, not long since, three nature books of a sort 
to make Thoreau turn over in his grave, — accounts 
of beasts and birds such as old Thetbaldus gave us in 
his “ Physiologus,” that pious and marvelous bestiary 
of the dark ages. These three volumes that I refer 
to are modern and about American animals, but they, 
too, might have been written during the dark ages. 
All three have the same solemn preface, declaring 
the absolute truth of the observations that follow (as 
if we might doubt ?), and piously pointing out their 
high moral purpose; all three likewise start out with 
the same wonderful story,—-an animal biography : 
one, of a slum cat, born in a cracker box. Among the 
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