Hardy little farmers! Bold small folk! Why climb for a home with your tiny, bare-soled feet above the aerie of the eagle and the cave of the soaring condor of the Sierras? Why not descend to the warm valleys, where winter, indeed, comes, but cannot linger?--or farther down where the grass is always green, with never a need to cut and cure a winter’s hay? I do not know why--nor why upon the tossing waves the little petrel makes her bed; nor why, beneath the waves, “down to the dark, to the utter dark” on “The great gray level plains of ooze,” the “blind white sea-snakes” make their home; nor why at the north, in the fearful, far-off, frozen north, the little lemmings dwell; nor why, nor why. But as I sat there above the clouds, listening to the plaintive, trembling whistle of the little cony, and hoping his mate was not dead, and wondering why he stayed here in the barren peak, and how he must fare in the black, bitter winter, I said over to myself the lines of Kipling for an answer,-- “And God who clears the grounding berg And steers the grinding floe, He hears the cry of the little kit-fox And the lemming on the snow.” NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAPTER I TO THE TEACHER Let me say again that the best thing any nature book can do for its readers is to take them out of doors; and that the best thing any nature-study teacher can do for them is to take them out of doors. Think of going to school to a teacher so simple, wholesome, vigorous, original, and rich in the qualities of the soul that she (how naturally we say “she”!)--that she comes to her classroom by way of the Public Garden, carrying a bird-glass in her hand! or across the fields with a rare orchid in her hand, and the freshness and sweetness of the June morning in her face and spirit! Why, I should like to be a boy again just to have such a teacher. Instead of bird-songs it is too often school gossip, instead of orchids it is clothes, instead of the open fields it is the round of the schoolroom that most teachers are absorbed in. Most teachers can add and spell much better than they can read, because they do not know the literary values and suggestions of words. Nothing would so help the run of teachers as the background, the observation and feeling, that would come from an intimate knowledge of the out-of-doors in the vicinity of their schoolrooms. FOR THE PUPIL PAGE 1 Learn first of all the joy of walking. It is enough at first to say “I am going to take a woods walk,” with nothing smaller in mind to do or hear or see. Such tramping itself is one of the very best ways of meeting the wild folk, and getting acquainted with nature. Go to a variety of places--the seashore, the water-front, the upland pasture, the deep swamps, even if you take a car-ride to reach them. Then select the place nearest at hand to frequent and watch closely. PAGE 3