wo species of
the puma, one in the West called the "mountain lion," very fierce and
dangerous; the other called in the East the "panther,"--a harmless and
cowardly animal. "Both the same species," said the President, "and
almost identical in disposition."

Nothing is harder than to convince a person that he has seen wrongly.
The other day a doctor accosted me in the street of one of our inland
towns to tell me of a strange bird he had seen; the bird was
blood-red all over and was in some low bushes by the roadside. Of
course I thought of our scarlet tanager, which was then just arriving.
No, he knew that bird with black wings and tail; this bird had no
black upon it, but every quill and feather was vivid scarlet. The
doctor was very positive, so I had to tell him we had no such bird in
our state. There was the summer redbird common in the Southern States,
but this place is much beyond its northern limit, and, besides, this
bird is not scarlet, but is of a dull red. Of course he had seen a
tanager, but in the shade of the bushes the black of the wings and
tail had escaped him.

This was simply a case of mis-seeing in an educated man; but in the
untrained minds of trappers and woodsmen generally there is an element
of the superstitious, and a love for the marvelous, which often
prevents them from seeing the wild life about them just as it is. They
possess the mythopoeic faculty, and they unconsciously give play to
it.

Thus our talk wandered as we wandered along the woods and field paths.
The President brought us back by the corner of a clover meadow where
he was sure a pair of red-shouldered starlings had a nest. He knew it
was an unlikely place for starlings to nest, as they breed in marshes
and along streams and in the low bushes on lake borders, but this pair
had always shown great uneasiness when he had approached this plot of
tall clover. As we drew near, the male starling appeared and uttered
his alarm note. The President struck out to look for the nest, and for
a time the Administration was indeed in clover, with the alarmed
black-bird circling above it and showing great agitation. For my
part, I hesitated on the edge of the clover patch, having a farmer's
dread of seeing fine grass trampled down. I suggested to the President
that he was injuring his hay crop; that the nest was undoubtedly there
or near there; so he came out of the tall grass, and, after looking
into the old tumbled-down barn--a regular early