nsion; it
is the contented, complaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord over
his domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all these crops; men
plow and sow for me, and I stay here or go there, and find life sweet
and good wherever I am. The hawk looks awkward and out of place on the
ground; the game birds hurry and skulk, but the crow is at home and
treads the earth as if there were none to molest him or make him afraid.

The crows we have always with us, but it is not every day or every
season that one sees an eagle. Hence I must preserve the memory of one I
saw the last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring up the side of a
mountain at the head of a valley, the noble bird sprang from the top of
a dry tree above me and came sailing directly over my head. I saw him
bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of his plumage,
as if the web off every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong,
level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When he
was fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement
in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once breaking his
majestic poise till he appeared to sight some far-off alien geography,
when he bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished in the blue
depths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas, he embraces long distances;
the continent is his home. I never look upon one without emotion; I
follow him with my eye as long as I can. I think of Canada, of the Great
Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of the wild and sounding sea-coast. The
waters are his, and the woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces
behind the veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth and vast
spaces.

We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in the edge of the woods,
and are lucky to find a single scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems
almost to light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Beside
a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue lobelia (Lobelia
syphilitica), and near it amid the weeds and wild grasses and purple
asters the most beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian. What
a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the gentian has amid its
coarse, unkempt surroundings. It does not lure the bee, but it lures and
holds every passing human eye. If we strike through the corner of yonder
woods, where the ground is moistened by hidden springs and where there
is a little opening amid the