NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 125 



you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can sound 

 them again to you as you read ? Nature is not only interesting 

 for herself ; hut also absolutely necessary for you to know if you 

 would know and love poetry. 



the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry ; the 

 other with a message slow and solemn : What is the warning, would 

 you say, in the scream of the jay ? the solemn message in the 

 caw of the crow ? 



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cave days : Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the history 

 of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost wholly upon 

 the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone weapons. 



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to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon : Some of the birds go 

 even farther south — away into Patagonia at the end of the south- 

 ern hemisphere. There is no more interesting problem, no more 

 thrilling sight in all nature, than this of the migrating birds — 

 the little warblers flying from Brazil to Labrador for the few 

 weeks of summer, there to rear their young and start back again 

 on the long, perilous journey ! 



CHAPTER XIII 



TO THE TEACHER 



Let the chapter be read aloud by one pupil, with as much feeling 

 as possible to the paragraph beginning, " I love the sound of the 

 surf," etc.; for this part is story, action, movement. Do not try to 

 teach anything in this half. Let some other thoughtful pupil read the 

 next section as far as, " Honk, honk, honk," beginning the third para- 

 graph from the end. This contains the lesson, the moral, and if you 

 stop anywhere to talk about bird-protection, do it here. Let a third 

 pupil read the rest of the chapter. Better than a moral lesson di- 

 rectly taught (and such lessons are much like doses of castor oil) will 

 be the touching of the child's imagination by the picture of the long 

 night-flight high up in the clouds. Read them " To a Water Fowl," 

 by Bryant; and also some good account of migration like that by 

 D. Lange (" The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life ") in the Atlantic 



