make a dry
branch bud and blossom before the eyes. I must look into my heart and
write, or remain dumb. Robert Louis Stevenson said one should be able
to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could. Stevenson had the
true literary legerdemain; he was master of the art of writing; he could
invest a broomstick with charm; if it remained a broomstick, it was one
on which the witches might carry you through the air at night. Stevenson
had no burden of meaning to deliver to the world; his subject never
compelled him to write; but he certainly could invest common things and
thoughts with rare grace and charm. I wish I had more of this gift,
this facility of pen, apart from any personal interest in the subject.
I could not grow eloquent over a broomstick, unless it was the stick of
the broom that used to stand in the corner behind the door in the old
kitchen at home--the broom with which Mother used to sweep the floor,
and sweep off the doorstones, glancing up to the fields and hills as she
finished and turned to go in; the broom with which we used to sweep the
snow from our boots and trouser-legs when we came from school or from
doing the chores in winter. Here would be a personal appeal that would
probably find me more inevitably than it would Stevenson.

I have never been in the habit of doing a thing, of taking a walk,
or making an excursion, for the purpose of writing it up. Hence, when
magazine editors have asked me to go South or to California, or here
or there, to write the text to go with the pictures their artist would
make, I have felt constrained to refuse. The thought that I was expected
to write something would have burdened me and stood in the way of my
enjoyment, and unless there is enjoyment, there is no writing with me.

I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines to
a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an artist,
and a memorable day it was, too, with plenty of natural and of human
interest, but nothing came of it--my perverse pen would not do what it
was expected to do; it was no longer a free pen.

When I began observing the birds, nothing was further from my thoughts
than writing them up. I watched them and ran after them because I loved
them and was happy with them in the fields and woods; the writing came
as an afterthought, and as a desire to share my enjoyment with others.
Hence, I have never carried a notebook, or collected data about nature
in my