"I am reliving days when the warm sun, falling on radiant slopes of grass, lit the meadow phlox and tall tiger lilies to flaming torches of color. I think of blackberry thickets and odorous grapevines, and cherry-trees and the delicious nuts which grew in profusion throughout the forest to the north. The forest, which seemed endless and was of enchanted solemnity, served as our wilderness. We explored it at every opportunity. We loved every day for the color it brought, each season for the wealth of its experiences, and we welcomed the thought of spending all our years in this beautiful home where the wood and the prairie of our song did actually meet and mingle.... I studied the clouds. I gnawed the beautiful red skin from the seed vessels which hung upon the wild rose bushes, and I counted the prairie chickens as they began to come together in winter flocks, running through the stubble in search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the lizards unhoused by the shares, ... and I measured the little granaries of wheat which the mice and gophers had deposited deep under the ground, storehouses which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt enviously on the sailing hawk and on the passing of ducks.... Often of a warm day I heard the sovereign cry of the sand-hill crane falling from the azure throne, so high, so far, his form could not be seen, so close to the sun that my eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic, circling sweep.... His brazen, reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind with mellow, pulsating earth, spring grass and cloudless glorious May-time skies." Henry Fawcett lived at about the same period in a rural district in England. He, too, delighted to ramble in the fields. One day, when he was out hunting with his father, an accidental gunshot deprived him of his eyesight. But the boy would not think of shutting himself away from the joys of nature which meant so much to him. "I very soon came to the resolution to live, as far as possible, just as I had lived before.... No one can more enjoy catching a salmon in the Tweed of the Spey, or throwing a fly in some quiet trout stream in Wiltshire or Hampshire." In the story of the life of John J. Audubon an incident is told that shows how the greatest joy can be found in what seems like one of the most ordinary things in the life of the forest--the nesting of the birds: