With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig, six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored, profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves. Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm? The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed. Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet, lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night posing as a twig. Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it came like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.