LITERARY TREATMENT OF NATURE 
hard put to it for food; their color does not make 
them conspicuous, —all these things, no doubt, tend 
to make them more familiar than their congeners. 
Why, again, the chickadee can be induced to perch 
upon your hand, and take food from it, more readily 
than can the nuthatch or the woodpecker, is a ques- 
tion not so easily answered. It being a lesser bird, it 
probably has fewer enemies than either of the others, 
and its fear would be less in proportion. 
Why does the dog, the world over, use his nose 
in covering the bone he is hiding, and not his paw ? 
Is it because his foot would leave a scent that 
would give his secret away, while his nose does not ? 
He uses his paw in digging the hole for the bone, 
but its scent in this case would be obliterated by 
his subsequent procedure. 
The foregoing is one way to interpret or explain 
natural facts. Everything has its reason. To hit 
upon this reason is to interpret it to the understand- 
ing. To interpret it to the emotions, or to the moral 
or to the esthetic sense, that is another matter. 
I would not be unjust or unsympathetic toward 
this current tendency to exalt the lower animals into 
the human sphere. I would only help my reader to 
see things as they are, and to stimulate him to love 
the animals as animals, and not as men. Nothing is 
gained by self-deception. The hest discipline of life 
is that which prepares us to face the facts, no matter 
what they are. Such sweet companionship as one 
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