AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 



3 



work to be sacrificed in summer for school purposes, so that to them only 

 the winter session of the school year was available. 



Despite hard work and long hours, the farm proved attractive and 

 satisfying for a time, but at about the age of fourteen the love inspired by 

 this free contact with natural surroundings developed a desire to know more 

 of the animal and plant life, the soil and the rocks, and the ever changing 

 phenomena of sky and air, than could be gained merely by association. 



At the age of thirteen, after much pleading on my part, to my great 

 delight, my father presented me with a gun. At first it merely afforded 

 the pleasure all boys experience in being able to shoot something, either as 

 game or on the pretext that certain birds and animals are destructive to 

 crops, and that it is desirable to reduce their numbers. But very soon the 

 destructive instinct gave place to a desire to possess specimens for study, 

 particularly of birds, which I found were so numerous in kinds that com- 

 paratively few of them were known by name to any of the people, either 

 of town or country, whom I met. Warblers, vireos, kinglets, sparrows 

 and many other kinds of birds were shot, measured, weighed, described 

 and given provisional names in my notebooks, so that I might again recog- 

 nize them when met with, long before I knew that books had been written 

 about them and that they all had names, Latin as well as English. I even 

 made attempts to draw and color them, but entire lack of instruction in the 

 work led only to failure and disappointment. A little later, however, I 

 made the acquaintance of Bradford Horsford, a teacher of drawing, who 

 was also an amateur ornithologist and taxidermist, with a good knowledge 

 of all the commoner birds. From him I borrowed a copy of the Brewer 

 edition of Wilson's 'American Ornithology,' which, to my unspeakable 

 delight, he later sold to me; Nuttall's and Audubon's works on North 

 American birds were also found in the public library of Springfield, and a 

 new world was opened to me! 



A little later I made the acquaintance of a man of broader education 

 than I had ever before met, who taught our district school for several 

 winter terms, and became a resident of the neighborhood. As he was a 

 nature-lover himself he could appreciate my aspirations, and most gener- 

 ously presented me with a copy of Blythe's 'Cuvier's Animal Kingdom,' 

 a work of which I previously had never heard. Thus equipped, and with 

 the resources of a public library now at my command, acquaintance with 

 not only the local birds, mammals, reptiles and fishes, but with many of the 

 insects, became a delightful experience. Interest in farm work as an 

 occupation as rapidly declined, but a filial desire to share fully in the f?mily 

 burdens led to no neglect of duties but often to excessive effort in manual 

 labor to demonstrate an interest otherwise unfelt. 



