I might have used a star, or the sun, or the sea to teach the lesson involved here, instead of the crow and his three broken feathers. But these three feathers will do for your pupils as the falling apple did for Sir Isaac Newton. The point of the chapter is: that the feathers like the stars must round out their courses; that this universe is a universe of law, of order, and of reason, even to the wing feathers of a crow. Try to show your pupils the beauty and wonder of order and law (not easy to do) as well as the beauty and wonder of shapes and colors and sounds, etc. FOR THE PUPIL PAGE 34 _primaries, secondaries, tertials_: Turn to your dictionary under “Bird” (or at the front of some good bird book) and study out just which feathers of the wing these named here are. PAGE 35 _half-moulted hen_: Pick her up and notice the regular and systematic arrangement of the young feathers. Or take a plucked hen and draw roughly the pin-feather scheme as you find it on her body. PAGE 37 _reed-birds_: The bobolink is also called “rice-bird” from its habit of feeding in the rice-fields of the South on its fall migration. CHAPTER VI FOR THE PUPIL Do not stop doing or seeing or hearing when you have done, seen, and heard the few things suggested in this chapter and in chapters IV and X; for these are only suggestions, and merely intended to give you a start, as if your friend had said to you upon your visiting a new city, “Now, don’t fail to see the Common and the old State House, etc.; and don’t fail to go down to T Wharf, etc.,”--knowing that all the time you would be doing and seeing and hearing a thousand interesting things. CHAPTER VII TO THE TEACHER I called this chapter when I first wrote it “The Friendship of Nature”--a much used title, but entirely suggestive of the thought and the lesson in the story here. This was first written about six years ago, and to-day, May 12, 1912, that pair of phœbes, or another pair, have their nest out under the pig-pen roof as they have had every year since I have known the pen. Repeat and expand the thought as I have put it into the mouth of Nature in the first paragraph--“We will share them [the acres] together.” Instill into your pupils’ minds the large meaning of obedience to Nature’s laws and love for her and all her own. Show them also how ready Nature is (and all the birds and animals and flowers) to be friendly; and how even a city dooryard may hold enough live _wild_ things for a small zoo. This chapter might well be made use of by the city teacher to stir her pupils to see what interesting live things their city or neighborhood has, although the woods and open fields are miles away. FOR THE PUPIL PAGE 48 _a hornet’s nest_: the white-faced hornet, that builds the great cone-shaped paper nests.