The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to separate and distinguish things; and there is no better training for this than to get in the way of looking and listening for what is characteristic. Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild life; so that some of the _sounds_ in this chapter may need to have others substituted to meet those differences. Remember that _you_ are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good teacher is a very much better thing. FOR THE PUPIL Now do not stuff cotton in your ears as soon as you have heard these ten sounds; or, what amounts to the same thing, do not stop listening. If you do only what the book says and nothing else, learn just the day’s lesson and nothing more, your teacher may think you a very “good scholar,” but I will tell you that you are a poor student of nature. The woods are full of sounds--voices, songs, whisperings--that are to be heard when none of these ten are speaking. PAGES 88 AND 90 _hear their piercing whistle: the husky yap, yap, yap of the fox_: It is usually the young hawks in the fall that whistle, as it is usually the young foxes in the summer and fall that bark. PAGE 91 “Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.” “The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.” Study this whole poem (“The Death of the Flowers,” by Bryant) for its excellent natural history. Could the poet have written it had he been ignorant of nature? Can you appreciate it all unless you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can sound them again to you as you read? Nature is not only interesting for herself; but also absolutely necessary for you to know if you would know and love poetry. _the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn_: What is the warning, would you say, in the scream of the jay? the solemn message in the caw of the crow? PAGE 94 _cave days_: Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the history of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost wholly upon the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone weapons. PAGE 95