_Shepherd-dog:_ Only a well-trained dog would do, for turkeys are very timid and greatly afraid of a strange dog. PAGE 18 _Black Creek_: a local name; not in the Geography. PAGE 26 _a chorus of answering gobbles:_ Turkeys will follow their leader. It was this habit or trait that the boys now made use of. CHAPTER III TO THE TEACHER There is a three-pronged point to this chapter: (1) the empty birds’ nests are not things to mourn over. The birds are safe and warm down south; and they will build fresh, clean nests when they get back. Teach your children to see things as they are--the wholesomeness, naturalness, wisdom, and poetry of Nature’s arrangement. The poets are often sentimental; and most sentimentality is entirely misplaced. (2) The nest abandoned by the bird may be taken up by the mouse. The deadest, commonest of things may prove full of life and interest upon close observation. Summer may go; but winter comes and brings its own interests and rewards. So does youth go and old age come. There is nothing really abandoned in nature--nothing utterly lacking interest. (3) A mouse is not a Bengal tiger; but he is a whole mouse and in the _completeness_ of his life just as large and interesting as the tiger. If the small, the common, the things right at hand, are not interesting, it is not their fault--not the mouse’s fault--but _ours_. FOR THE PUPIL PAGE 30 _white-foot_: the deer, or wood mouse (_Peromyscus leucopus_). PAGE 32 “_There are no birds in last year’s nest_”: a line from a poem by Longfellow called “It is not always May.” PAGE 33 _Darwin’s book on earthworms:_ Read in this book how the worms make garden soil. CHAPTER IV TO THE TEACHER If you have at hand “The Fall of the Year,” read again the suggestions on page 112 for the chapter on “Things to See this Fall,” making use of this chapter as you did of that (1) as the object of a field excursion--or of several excursions until all the things suggested here have been seen; (2) as a test of the pupil’s actual study of nature; for there is scarcely a city child who cannot get far enough into nature (though he get no farther than the city park), and often enough to see most of the things pointed out in this chapter; (3) as suggestions for further study and observation by the pupils--things that they have seen which might be added to these ten here, and written about for composition work in English. FOR THE PUPIL