For three weeks the walls of this house were going up. Is it astonishing that, when finished, they looked like a growth of the limb, like part and parcel of the very tree? I made a daily visit to the sapling until the young birds flew away; then I bent the tree to the ground and brought the nest home. It now hangs above my desk, its thick walls, its downy bed, its leafy canopy telling still of the little mother's unwearied industry, of her infinite love and foresight. So faultlessly formed, so safely saddled to the limb, so exquisitely lichened into harmony with the green around, this tiniest nest speaks for all of the birds. How needless, how sorry, would be the loss of these beautiful neighbors of our copses and fields! [Illustration: frog] FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP There are many lovers of the out-of-doors who court her in her robes of roses and in her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only. Now a lover that never sees her barefoot in the meadow, that never hears her commonplace chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in her lowly, humdrum life among the toads and snakes, has little genuine love for his mistress. To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the long Latin name of the ragweed, to exclaim over the bobolink's song, to go into ecstasies at a glorious sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at all. One who does all this sincerely, but who stuffs his ears to the din of the spring frogs, is in love with nature's pretty clothes, her dainty airs and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies deeper down. When one has gone down to that, then a March without peepers will be as lonesome as a crowd without friends; then an orchard without the weather-wise hyla can never make good his place with mere apples; and the front door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath its step will lack something quite as needful to its evening peace and homeness as it lacks when the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are gone. We are not humble nor thoughtful out of doors. There is too much sentiment in our passion for nature. We make colored plates and poems to her. All honor to the poets! especially to those who look carefully and see deeply, like Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But what the common run of us needs, when we go a-wooing nature, is not more poetry, but a scientific course in biology. How a little study in comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal to us the fearful and wonderful in the make-up of all animal forms! And the fearful and wonderful have a meaning and a beauty which we ought to realize.