t crossed the precise spot upon which my eye was fixed. As it was
near sundown, they were probably launched for an all-night pull. They
were going with great speed, and as they swayed a little this way and
that, they suggested a slender, all but invisible, aerial serpent
cleaving the ether. What a highway was pointed out up there!--an easy
grade from the Gulf to Hudson's Bay.

Then the typical spring and summer and autumn days, of all shades and
complexions,--one cannot afford to miss any of them; and when looked
out upon from one's own spot of earth, how much more beautiful and
significant they are! Nature comes home to one most when he is at
home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and a traveler
also. One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part
of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects
his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the
horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he
suffers. How has the farmer planted himself in his fields; builded
himself into his stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by
his struggle! This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is
important to the observer. This is the bird-lime with which he catches
the bird; this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes.
This is one source of Gilbert White's charm, and of the charm of
Thoreau's "Walden."

The birds that come about one's door in winter, or that build in his
trees in summer, what a peculiar interest they have! What crop have I
sowed in Florida or in California, that I should go there to reap? I
should be only a visitor, or formal caller upon nature, and the family
would all wear masks. No; the place to observe nature is where you
are; the walk to take to-day is the walk you took yesterday. You will
not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer
have changed; the ship is on another tack in both cases.

[Illustration: A CATSKILL ROADWAY]

I shall probably never see another just such day as yesterday was,
because one can never exactly repeat his observation,--cannot turn the
leaf of the book of life backward,--and because each day has
characteristics of its own. This was a typical March day, clear, dry,
hard, and windy, the river rumpled and crumpled, the sky intense,
distant objects strangely near; a day full of strong light, unusual;
an extraordinary lightness and clearness all around the ho