The wood had a climate of its own, cooler, darker than the hot, damp, wide open world of road and shore. There are climates within climates, as there are worlds within worlds. Under the bark of a tree the beetle inhabits a place that has special atmospheric conditions differing from the woods outside it; and so it is with the woodchuck in its hole, the ants in their hill. Any place, of whatever size, however endowed in our scheme of things with grandeur or insignificance, any home, may be greatly subtle in its variance. A sweet, plaintive “pee-a-wee,” and a wood peewee, a neat little bird, black, light gray, and white like a phoebe, but with white wing bars, flew in quickly and lightly, to perch on a gray limb. The bird would tuck its head down, and then move it from side to side, looking for flying insects, repeating its song every five seconds or so. Its tail, not bobbing like a phoebe’s, twitched very slightly when its head moved. Then, in brief action, it fluttered out, caught an insect, and returned to its perch. These little flights covered most of the area around its tree, almost methodically. Once I heard the crack of its bill as it chased a fly almost down to the ground, halfway across the wood. It alighted on a new branch--to try out another base of action? But then another peewee flew in, perched, and sang at a far corner of the hollow, and the first one hurriedly flew back to its original perch as if it had been threatened and was making sure of its position. The wood seemed strung together by the intangible threads of their motion. [Illustration] These were some of the ways by which a wood peewee follows its destiny, employing its chosen place, attending to minutiae, to duty and performance. This was appropriate use, measured necessity. And as the outer earth led to this part of the wood, and it in turn to the “micro-climates” within it, so the birds drew my attention to the insects. I had been bitten a little, just enough to remind me, in my enjoyment, that the place was not unnaturally hospitable; and there were unseen spider mites that would leave me some inflammations to remember them by. Now I searched the space above me, aware, through the flights of the peewee, of the flying life it pursued. Some flies hovered, rocking lightly in the air, and then swung abruptly to one side, or dropped away, buzzing insistently. Tiny midges, illumined by sunlight, waggled between the trees. Moths fluttered down briefly to touch the pale leaves they resembled. So I had been filled, as I sat there, with a sense of employment. I was part of a quiet, steady, structure of action. What better “security” could I find than that--learning, feeling, that a prodigious energy held all component parts in place and made them dance. In the neatness, discipline, almost detachment, of the bird’s little game as it pursued its subsistence, I saw the working out of natural law in numberless parallels.