and plants about them. We take an ab¬ 
surd interest, he maintains, in the arrival 
and departure of the birds, the date on 
which they first set up housekeeping, and 
the ways and means by which they pro- j 
cure food for themselves and their families, i 
Our human neighbors, he contends, are 
much more Interesting, and yet we care ( 
little or nothing for their goings and com¬ 
ings. They may move out from town in 
the spring, but we do not find it necessary 
to set down the date in a book and to see 
whether it is a day earlier or later than 
last year. We see them getting their daily 
bread in a great variety of fashions, but 
we do not watch them through an opera 
glass when they bring home a brown paper 
parcel. 
There is no doubt that my neighbor has 
much right on his side. The intense inter¬ 
est with which we note anything connected 
with the lives of those whom we especially 
love has occasionally an' element of the 
ridiculous. The doings and sayings of 
children sometimes have more .fascination 
for their parents than for other children’s 
parents. 
It is more difficult, however, to observe 
one’s neighbors; there IS a prejudice In 
favor of keeping one’s own affairs. It is 
true that we get Invitations to their wed¬ 
dings, their parties and their funerals, 
and they tell us when they have bought a 
mahogany table at a bargain; but the 
really interesting things, the things 
which would enable us to identify them 
as we do the birds, these they generally 
take pains to conceal. Their good deeds 
they do by stealth; and we hear of them 
only long after; their sufferings they 
bear in private, and their follies they 
confide only to their wives, by whom they 
will occasionally be reminded of them, 
lest they forget,. 
There are people, however, even in our 
town, who pursue the study of their 
neighbors as eagerly and successfully as 
the most ardent ornithologist studies the 
birds. They can tell you not only the 
dates of arrival and departure of their 
neighbors’ servants, but also why they 
departed. They know not only the kind ; 
of food and furniture provided for the j 
family, but whether or not It Is paid for. | 
They know all about their neighbors’ j 
plumage, whether they moult annually j 
or semi-annually, and whether the spring 1 
plumage is acquired as in the case of 
some birds, by a change of color without 
moult. If the editor of the Transoript 
wishes to provide his readers ■with some-« j 
thing perennially Interesting, the supply 
of which is not cut off by a backward ' 
spring, let him persuade one of these 
sharp-eyed people to furnish him with a 
weekly letter under the title, “Human 
Nature About Boston." 
Na tube About Boston 
IX- 
BY RALPH HOFFMANN 
To the other passengers it seemed only 
a sluggish ditch, issuing from a muddy 
swamp, and passing under the railroad 
into a s-ed-gy meadow. But we knew that 
it was Bl-m Brook, and that beyond the 
sedgy meadow it passed under the Bed¬ 
ford -road, and mingled its waters with 
the ©hawsheen. 
It was half-past eight on the morning 
of May 18, when we embarked from a 
convenient tussock of sedge. It was the 
kind -of morning when The governor, if 
he were an ornithologist or a school¬ 
boy, would announce a legal holiday, and 
take his canoe to E'lm Brook. It had 
been overcast all the morning, but the 
sun was just beginning to find rifts in 
the cloud's, through which misty light 
fell on distant hills. This was a signal 
for all the birds in the swamp, in the 
meadows and even in the streets of Bed¬ 
ford. 
A small bush of rhodora, just coming 
into flower, was almost the first object 
that attracted our attention, after we 
were under way. We looked forward to 
many a field fringed with purple, but 
this -single bush remained -the only bit 
of the flower that we saw all day. The 
chief flower of the trip was undoubted¬ 
ly sedge; .it would be difficult to esti¬ 
mate the number of tussocks of this 
plant past which the Shawsheen idles; 
eighty-five hundred million seemed to us 
a moderate estimate. Each tussock was 
tipped with long dull-yellow -heads, 
Which if -swept with -a paddle, shook out 
a cloud of dusty pollen, which the south 
wind drifted on over -the neighboring 
tussocks or into the stream, itself. At 
fairly regular intervals a pair of red¬ 
wing blackbirds rose with shrill outcries 
and protestations from some tussock, the 
male with blazing epaulets, the female 
brown and streaked, -but quite as noisy. 
Blue violets grew among the sedge, 
particularly where the border partook of 
the character of a meadow, tall-stemmed 
with a spot of darker blue in the centre. 
When the banks were quite firm colo¬ 
nies of anemone spread their white, 
Wide-open flowers to the sun; before we 
ended our trip the flowers had closed and 
were nodding. The chief floral display 
was without question provided by the 
shad bush; all along the -banka as far 
ahead or behind as we could see, a cloud 
of white rested agains-t the gray leafless 
woods. Eac-h bush grows from the edge 
of the meadow to about the same height, 
and -is completely -covered with bloom, 
so that the repetition of the same color 
effect, at about the same height from 
the ground at more or less regular In¬ 
tervals, had the effect of a border, de¬ 
signed toy nature. 
We intended to take a train 'back from 
Ball-ardvale, whenever we got there; an 
elastic arrangement, but dependent after 
all on eventually reaching the spot. The 
distance on the map of the Geological 
Survey looked reasonably short, tout we 
found out tlhat, accurate as the survey 
doubtless had been in other respects, 
