UZ GAUNT remarked to me, many years ago, “I never saw the critter, but there's a bird that whistles ‘wait a bit' at sunrise, and the day counts for nothing if you listen." To escape the ensnaring charm of this strange bird, start before daylight. Even in so light a matter as an August day-dream, keep the day behind you. Then, too, no one loves to be crowded, and there is more room ahead of time than behind it.

This is the way in which Zadkiel, the English astrologer, forecasts the character of this August day: “Travel and visit thy friends." Not all of my friends are asleep at 3 A.M., if, so be it, we have cultivated the good graces of our non-human neighbors. As I left my home, the harvest-moon, in filmy drapery, still held court, and the morning star shone with darkest midnight's deepest brilliancy. It was friendship enough to have them light our path, and while yesterday was a memory and to-morrow but vague expectation, the woods and waters, meadows and fair fields awaited the rambler.

Says Zadkiel, “Travel and visit thy friends." It is well to do this in the order given: travelling first, for only too vividly the rambler recalls the torrid noontides of this ripened season; recalls what time

Well, let their excusable profanity go unrecorded. It is enough to know that long before noonday wild life, as a whole, will gladly seek the shade, leaving the world to parched weeds and fiery dragon-flies. And so, having travelled while the day was new, your friends will be gathered in the shady nook in which you take refuge.

So ran my anticipatory thoughts as I wormed my way along the village street, and what now of the outer world that offers such varied attractions? Let no thought of discovery creep in. It is August, and a time of rest. If it will, let the morning breeze transport you, or, better, drift with the tide. Be gay as a butterfly, but only in butterfly fashion. Do not be serious. Close your ears if a bird scolds. Laugh your loudest when the robin announces dawn.

I have been drifting in the canoe for an hour and the east grows gray. Afar off, there is the half-uttered note of a sleepy bird that dies upon the river. I have to be more than watchful to catch the next note that comes, but as the light strengthens, a hundred voices announce the dawn, and the wide world is again astir. A filmy thread of smoke rises from the woods, and why be so prosy as to think of farmers and the kitchen stove? As yet, civilization has nowhere marred the broad landscape, so why not this thread of smoke the sign of an Indian camp; or, perhaps, of more gloomy import? Here is what a close observer writes me of Indian mortuary customs: "According to local tradition, the Indians never buried their dead in this part of the Delaware valley, but placed them in the sun to dry, covering the bodies with bark and leaves. When thus laid out they were carefully watched and fires kept burning to keep wild animals away. After a certain time the bodies were burned. This crude tradition is verified, I think, by the numerous stone graves or cists found in this neighborhood. The stones forming the framework of the graves were flat slabs that together made an enclosure only about three feet in length by little more than one-half that measurement in width and depth. In all these occur charcoal and partly consumed human remains. Cremation was never complete, and the burning occurred in the stone cists or graves; and further, many of them were used time after time until filled with human mould and ashes, and then sealed up." As yet I have found no evidence of such ceremonies here in the tide-water portion of the river valley, and my friend writes of the mountains some sixty miles away. That the same people in the two localities had different burial customs is very possible, but it may be the interloping Shawnees were the stone-grave people and not the Delawares. But let us turn from this gruesome subject, fit only for dull days and dyspeptics, and seek the glare and glitter of August sunshine.

This is the proper work for August days: put your hands behind your back and send imagination on a picnic. It so happened that where the rivershore kindly offered firm root-hold to enormous elms there was, besides, a gently-sloping beach.

Here, upon a pebbly strand, I drew the canoe and rested myself in star-gazing attitude. All things tended to perfecting the reception-room, and my friends overlooked the deficiencies. No invitations had been sent out, and with that delightful informality which is of itself a charm, the birds came trooping in. First a cuckoo, that, deftly swinging on a pendulous twig, clucked or called the rain, as farmers say, and beat time with a graceful swaying of its tail. How few people know this common bird! All summer one has been living in the maples on the village street, and more than one wise villager has been wondering what queer trouble affected some neighbor's throat. Although there is a cheap edition of Wilson's Ornithology, ignorance of birds is all-prevalent. Ten to one, if a cuckoo is hung in the market-place it will not be recognized. The cuckoo of this morning was as lazy as myself, and yet August is his favorite month. I say this because nesting duties are over and the birds have only themselves to look after. A fat caterpillar rouses him at all times, and what bird-energy means can be learned by discovering an ailanthus-tree covered with cecropia worms at the moment a cuckoo makes the same discovery. The bird is afraid some of them may escape, and such frantic slaughtering cannot be described. It equals the killing of small fry when the blue-fish attack them. The cuckoo to-day solved no problem. It was studiously bird-like and reserved, chattered but for a moment and passed by, making no more impression than the acquaintances one meets on the street. Not so the next comer, a black-and-white tree-creeping warbler, a bird so small that it might nest by your front porch and you never know it. The little fellow knew nothing of August lassitude, but rattled loose bark and darted over an enormous area of arboreal territory. It is but a rough calculation, to be sure, but not far from a correct measurement, I take it. I counted twenty-seven main branches, each of which, as travelled by the bird, is twenty feet long, a stretch of five hundred and forty feet; then came one hundred branches of the second size with about ten feet of running room upon them, and, finally, fully fifteen hundred twigs, some five feet in length. This gives us a run-way over which the bird travelled of nine thousand and forty feet. Guessing at the meaning of certain suggestive movements when the bird was near, I concluded it captured an insect at every twenty feet; and so quickly is it all done that a hundred trees might be exhaustively searched in a day. No, not exhaustively, for no sooner has one bird left than another comes; and none go away empty. Doubtless every creeper visits at least fifty trees, and often twice that many, in a day, and so from two to five thousand insects is the amount of food consumed by a bird no bigger than your thumb. Man reaps the benefit of this destruction of insect-life, and yet I once saw one of these tree-creeping warblers on a girl's bonnet. Not a live one insect-hunting, but a dead one stuck on for an ornament!

There is a spasmodic outburst of indignation at long intervals, and bird-killing is condemned; but the millinery devils laugh and only lay up the larger stock against the return of the demand for feathers, which they know will come in due time. I recently walked for ten miles on the sea-beach, and saw less than ten gulls or terns. Twenty years ago you could not have heard yourself speak for the noise of these birds at the same time of year and place. It was near here, not many years ago, that I sat upon a sand dune to eat my lunch, and became so interested in throwing bits of bread and meat to the fearless terns that I went away, at last, hungry, having thrown all of my lunch to the birds. I remember an eccentric druggist who placed a stuffed fish-hawk over his counter, and the next spring a taxidermist near by had orders for a score of skins. To the credit of one wise man in the village, be it recorded, the law interfered; but who ever heard of the law protecting a wren or a bluebird? In some one of the forthcoming dictionaries let the compound word “dead-letter" be defined as “the law protecting useful birds."

As it neared high noon, the expected happened. Birds came trooping in, and every one on the same errand, — to take life easily. At times they were absurdly distributed, and recalled the compartment bird-cages in a menagerie. But inborn restlessness soon changed all this, and their nooning became as active as a morning hunt, but in a different way. The rippling water below them was a constant attraction, and from the tree to the river and return was a short journey that was often made. When at the water's edge, the behavior of the birds was widely different. Some merely drank, others bathed, and a cat-bird seemed wholly absorbed in contemplation, for it stood quietly on a flat stone and looked up and down the river. Did as I have done many a time, pausing before I pushed the boat into the stream, to determine which way to go. Here is a nice question for students of animal intelligence: Do animals of any kind ever contemplate? Closing my eyes to the busy world about me, I look backward and recall many a ramble in this same river valley. The nesting-birds of many a spring-tide are pictured on memory's tablet, and how often, as I interpreted it, a puzzled bird stopped to think! How evidently plans were changed! How frequently advanced work was abandoned! Why? If we can describe a bird at all, we must do so as we state our own actions. If sudden thoughts did not come to these birds; if unforeseen occurrences did not change their plans; if they were not moved as men are moved, then every movement was backed by some unknown phase of life-power of which man has no trace and can never realize. If so, we can look upon them as we do wind-tossed thistle-down, but can go no further. I doubt this. There is closer kinship than the world allows.

I clipped the following from a recent newspaper because of its suggestiveness:

“A number of ornithologists, possessed of the zeal that marks the faithful devotee of science, have climbed Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty by night and nestled in the hand of the goddess in order to make a study of the habits of migratory birds at this season of the year. It was a curious vantage-ground of study, and has yielded some curious results. Thus, it is stated by one of the observers that birds from Canada and Labrador, travelling by the sea-coast, seem to have learned the peril of collision with the statue, as year by year the number of the killed from this cause grows less. Another most interesting fact reported by another gentleman of the party was the evidence of a system of signals in flocks of birds. Each of the different flocks seemed to have a veteran leader, who gave a shrill call when passing strange sights. 'The call was invariably answered by some birds in the rear, and it seemed to me that the cries of the leaders mean an order to close up and keep together.' As self-preservation is the first law of nature, it is not a fanciful assumption that the birds of the air are gifted with this instinct in common with mankind; and that being so, the power of communing with each other would seem to follow as a necessary conclusion."

But birdmen need not climb so high to observe much of this, if, indeed, not every phenomenon. The trackless highway of the moonlit river-valley tells the same story. Anchor amid-stream when the hunter-moon is full, and mark the sounds that come floating earthward from the starlit skies. Signal and reply, alarm and general response; all that transpires as hosts are hurrying by can be noted here. Few suspect what a busy world there is above the tree-tops.

Amid all the varied changes in the tree above me, one feature of bird-life never varied. An indigo-finch sang without ceasing. I make this statement without qualification, although it conflicts with our views of physiology and usual experiences in observation. For hours it never left the tree, and seldom its perch. Its greatest journey was as short as “from the blue bed to the brown," and all the while it rang the brief changes of its sprightly song. Whether the sun poured its torrent of fervid rays upon it, or a passing cloud sheltered it and wooed a reviving breeze, mattered not; its sole aim was to rejoice that its lines had fallen in such pleasant places.

The world was given over to happiness alone, — in the mind of the dreamer; but, alas! things are not always what they seem. Far overhead a dark spot flecked the summer sky. It meant death to many a happy songster should it come too near. There are feathered as well as human demons. Why, indeed, should a falcon have been created? Its passing shadow chilled half a hundred hearts.

But the world was not made for singing-birds alone. The air trembled with the hum of countless myriads of lesser creatures, and every one rejoiced in the fulness of its heart. I pressed my head to the ground, and a tremor, as if every blade of grass was singing, rang in my ear. Every leaf of the huge elm above me, too, had a tuneful throat. But never a life of unclouded sunshine. The vehement whirring of a harvest-fly held the destroyer in its course. A flash in mid-air; a cry of agony that stilled the million tongues about me startled the earth; a fiery-banded hornet bore its helpless victim away.

After all, happiness is but comparative. It is well to rejoice if we escape misery, but it is weakness to look upon the last overshadowing cloud as really the last. We may deal only with sunshine while it is August, but winter is drawing on apace. We may rest now as though the world's work was done, but the demands of other days already peep above the horizon. To turn our backs upon them is but the fool's device. Well we know this; but yet, what journey so seductive as that without a goal? I would be a great traveller, but the world must come to me. I have been nowhere to-day, as the man of affairs would say, yet I have journeyed for hours. Why not pause at one point as well as another? Nature does not trumpet her glories to him who hastens. The river invited both to the mountains and the sea, but the influence of August to-day, as throughout all of my year, forbade a greater undertaking.