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THE BOOK SHELF 



In Berkshire Fields by Walter Prichard Eaton with eighty illustrations by 

 Walter King Stone, 312 pp., Price $3.50. Harper & Brothers. 



This is a nature-study book de luxe and is from every point of view genuine 

 nature-study. Mr. Eaton has open eyes and an understanding spirit for the 

 plants, animals, birds and their environment in his beloved Berkshires; it is 

 the sympathy of his mental and spiritual attitude that gives his writings a 

 living quality and peculiar charm. Take this description: "There is nothing, 

 to me, more fraught with charm and delightful associations than a New Eng- 

 land upland pasture, a pasture of irregular outline, with capes of fir and birch 

 jutting into it from the surrounding forest, with a mountain going up above 

 and a long green valley dropping away below, perhaps to the distant white 

 spire of the village church, with patches here and there of raspberry and blue- 

 berry and huckleberry bushes, and cow-paths amid the fragrant sweet-fern, 

 with thistle tops and steeple-bush to prick the field with pink, with the tinkle 

 of a distant cow-bell — and, as the sun is sinking in the west the fairy flutes of 

 the white- throated sparrows. It is on the edges of such pastures that the 

 white-throats (or Peabody birds) build their nests from the Adirondack and 

 White Mountains northward." Mr. Eaton has by no means confined himself 

 to the things he sees in the Berkshires but has a delightful way of harking back 

 to some experience of his boyhood or some later observation: "The white- 

 throats build their nests frequently on the ground, but sometimes in low bushes 

 or fallen, dead trees. I have found them in the dry branches of a small pros- 

 trate fir. And I have sat beneath a tree on the edge of a pasture on Cannon 

 Mountain in Franconia and listened for an hour while a parent bird tried to 

 teach a baby to sing. I have been told by real ornithologists that I did 

 nothing of the kind, to be sure, but that constrains me to think the scientists 

 do not know everything. The parent bird would sing, once, perfectly, and 

 then, in a feebler tone, the baby (both birds plainly visible not twenty feet 

 over my head) would attempt the same thing. Sometimes he would jump the 

 fifth correctly, sometimes he wouldn't come within two notes of it; and not 

 once, in the entire hour, did he get the succeeding intervals with accuracy. 

 But the parent bird, fluttering from twig to twig about him, kept opening her 

 white throat and pealing out the perfect song, and the little bird kept trying 

 to copy it. I suppose she wasn't really teaching it, because she had no black- 

 board nor piano " 



The illustrations by Mr. Stone are exquisitely adapted to the text. They 

 are full of life and true feeling. Well may the volume be dedicated to William 

 Hamilton Gibson, for not since his inspired brush gave us back in pictures the 

 scenes that we love, has there been anything produced so nearly of the same 

 quality as these illustrations. The well chosen and charmingly delineated 

 landscapes make perfect back-grounds for chickadee, hare, woodchuck, porcu- 



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