BY THE WAYSIDE 
87 
it is quite easy to get them to do almost 
anything by kindness, and by letting 
them feel that they are doing it not be¬ 
cause they have to do it, but for pure love. 
Animals become greatly attached to 
their owners through kindness, but never 
through abuse. No dog ever hesitates 
to come to the help of its owner when 
attacked, but will sometimes leave him if 
badly treated. Life is not too much to 
pay for kindness, but ill treatment always 
brings hatred. 
There are some animals so savage by 
nature that kindness seems wasted on 
them; this would seem so when we hear 
of a lion attacking his trainer, but this is 
because the natural fierceness of the beast 
causes him to forget the kindness that 
has been done him and I think that very 
often the lion is sorry for it afterwards. 
Boys often forget the kindness that is 
done them by others, so we must not be 
i surprised if a poor, dumb animal some¬ 
times forgets. 
Aged 11. A. G. Gennert 
From the Alton School. 
Dear Wayside: 
Last Easter vacation I went down the 
I Lemonweir river to the bend where Mile 
Creek and another creek join it. On my 
way I saw several red-headed wood¬ 
peckers. Some of them were fighting 
[ over a place to build a nest in a hollow 
limb. First one of them would stand in 
the door of the nest and stand guard over 
it. Then the other would swoop down 
from an upper limb and knock him out 
of the door. Then he would stand guard 
I over the nest, so they kept on fighting 
until one chased the other across the 
| river and they went out of sight. As I 
was going along I heard a king-fisher’s 
call. Pretty soon I saw him flying over¬ 
head. He flew quite a distance and 
poised himself in air for quite a few 
minutes; then he shot straight down and 
I lost sight of him behind the bank. On 
my way home I saw some red winged 
blackbirds. Every morning down back 
of our house in the pasture there are 
meadow larks singing. I have seen a 
number of dickcissels this spring. They 
look a good like a meadow lark but are 
smaller and have not such sweet songs. 
Then their bills are shorter and not so 
sharp but they live in much the same 
way. They will be out through a whole 
day of rain when other birds are under 
cover and they keep up a continual 
chant. They always seem happy. I 
have seen ruby-crowned kinglets, flickers 
bluebirds, robins and many other birds 
this spring. 
Harold McNown. 
Continued from page S3. 
breast or listen to Thoreau’s account of 
the origin of the bluebird’s color or to 
Hiawatha and his chickens. 
Yours truly, 
R. P. Crouch. 
Yorkville, Ill. 
Dear Wayside: 
Some of our language lessons we de¬ 
vote to birds, to describing the places 
where different birds meet, and the good 
which they do for the farmer. The chil¬ 
dren also learn poems about their 
feathered friends. 
All through the winter we have seen 
Chickadees, Nuthatches, Woodpeckers, 
