n my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a natural
bracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf.
I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feet
from the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for,
perfect in every particular--the right angle and the supporting brace,
or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten.

I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and
indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life
about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being
enacted every day before his very eyes--in his own garden and dooryard
and apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sits
under the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wild
life is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with the
seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction and
entertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live natural
history goes to waste every year because there is no historian to note
the happenings.

The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens--a screen of
leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert
and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere
fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that
take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course
of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have!
The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the
stage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages.

I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the road
between my place and the railway station one early May day became aware
that a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over their
heads. It was the annual _saengerfest_ of the goldfinches--one of the
prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical
reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many
hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in
the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to
the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account
for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds
sit singly here