oo late, the game had gone. I returned home full of
excitement at what I had seen, and gave as the excuse why I did not
shoot, that I had my mitten on, and could not reach the trigger of
my gun. It is true I had my mitten on, but there was a mitten, or
something, on my wits also. It was years before I heard the last of that
mitten; when I failed at anything they said, "John had his mitten on, I
guess."

I remember that I had a sort of cosmogony of my own when I was a mere
boy. I used to speculate as to what the world was made of. Partly
closing my eyes, I could see what appeared to be little crooked chains
of fine bubbles floating in the air, and I concluded that that was the
stuff the world was made of. And the philosophers have not yet arrived
at a much more satisfactory explanation.

In thinking of my childhood and youth I try to define to myself wherein
I differed from my brothers and from other boys in the neighborhood,
or wherein I showed any indication of the future bent of my mind. I see
that I was more curious and alert than most boys, and had more interests
outside my special duties as a farm boy. I knew pretty well the ways
of the wild bees and hornets when I was only a small lad. I knew the
different bumblebees, and had made a collection of their combs and
honey before I had entered my teens. I had watched the little frogs, the
hylas, and had captured them and held them till they piped sitting in my
hand. I had watched the leaf-cutters and followed them to their nests in
an old rail, or under a stone. I see that I early had an interest in
the wild life about me that my brothers did not have. I was a natural
observer from childhood, had a quick, sure eye and ear, and an eager
curiosity. I loved to roam the hills and woods and prowl along the
streams, just to come in contact with the wild and the adventurous. I
was not sent to Sunday-school, but was allowed to spend the day as I
saw fit, provided I did not carry a gun or a fishing-rod. Indeed, the
foundation of my knowledge of the ways of the wild creatures was laid
when I was a farm boy, quite unconscious of the natural-history value of
my observations.

What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this
direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I got it
through literature, and more especially through the works of Audubon,
when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.

The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in