You should see a dandelion. A dandelion? Yes, a dandelion, “fringing the dusty road with harmless gold.” But that almost requires four eyes--two to see the dandelion and two more to see the gold--the two eyes in your head, and the two in your imagination. Do you really know how to see anything? Most persons have eyes, but only a few really see. This is because they cannot look hard and steadily at anything. The first great help to real seeing is to go into the woods knowing what you hope to see--seeing it in your eye, as we say, before you see it in the out-of-doors. No one would ever see a tree-toad on a mossy tree or a whip-poor-will among the fallen leaves who did not have tree-toads and whip-poor-wills in mind. Then, secondly, look at the thing _hard_ until you see in it something peculiar, something different from anything like it that you ever saw before. Don’t dream in the woods; don’t expect the flowers to tell you their names or the wild things to come up and ask you to wait while they perform for you. CHAPTER V IF YOU HAD WINGS If you had wings, why of course you would wear feathers instead of clothes, and you might be a crow! And then of course you would steal corn, and run the risk of getting three of your big wing feathers shot away. All winter long, and occasionally during this spring, I have seen one of my little band of crows flying about with a big hole in his wing,--at least three of his large wing feathers gone, shot away probably last summer,--which causes him to fly with a list or limp, like an automobile with a flattened tire, or a ship with a shifted ballast. Now for nearly a year that crow has been hobbling about on one whole and one half wing, trusting to luck to escape his enemies, until he can get three new feathers to take the places of those that are missing. “Well, why doesn’t he get them?” you ask. If you were that crow, how would you get them? Can a crow, by taking thought, add three new feathers to his wing? Certainly not. That crow must wait until wing-feather season comes again, just as an apple tree must wait until apple-growing season comes to hang its boughs with luscious fruit. The crow has nothing to do with it. His wing feathers are supplied by Nature once a year (after the nesting-time), and if a crow loses any of them, even if right after the new feathers had been supplied, that crow will have to wait until the season for wing feathers comes around once more--if indeed he can wait and does not fall a prey to hawk or owl or the heavy odds of winter.