The Spring of the Year

between the "upper" and the "lower" pastures. It is a bent, broken, hoary old tree, grizzled with suckers from feet to crown. No one has

les, nor just because the cow-path takes me. That old apple tree is hollow, hollow all over, trunk and branches, as hollow as a lodging-house; and I have never known it when it w

s that infest my trees. Oh, yes, that would make it bear better apples, but what then would become of its birds and beasts? Everybody ought to have one apple tree that bears birds and beasts-and Baldwin apples, too, of course, if the three so

e called it,-a sheltered, sheltering spot; with a peddler's stall in the barn, a peddler's place at the table, a peddler's bed in the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless featherbed, of a piece with the house and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in the neighborhood; but no other house in all the regio

ver without first stopping, and especially before an old tree all full of holes. Whenever you se

mily residing here. The birds and beasts do not advertise their houses so. They would hide their houses, they would have you pass by; for most person

d most timid of the little people of the fields. Come over with me-they know me in the old apple tre

me of the fields, and, a little way at least, into a life of the fields, for,

seasonless, hopeless, lifeless month of the year, but for its owls, its thaws, its lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possible bluebirds, and its being the year's end! At least the ancients called February, not December, the year's

his window in the apple-tree turret yonder against the darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the meadow, beating, dangling, dropping between the flattene

UT OVER THE ME

t times that he has stirred my hair, by the wind-dare I say?-of his mysterious wings. At other times I have heard him. Often on the edge of night I hav

out over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow,

, as the soft dusk comes on, to see the round face of the owl in one hole and, out of

ening; both will make off under the cover of the night-one for mice and frogs over the m

still to think of them together; for it is just such prey as t

know nothing of; but I am inclined to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow lodger in the doorway above,

ke a patch of lichen, may well be one of the things that are hidden from even the sharp-eyed owl. It is always a source of fresh amazeme

ree-toads is something of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that, to my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree, now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several toads, you say, not one;

ree, now on the porch, often on the railing and backed tight up against a post. Was he one or many? we asked. Then we marked him; and for the next four years we knew that he was himself alone. How many mor

the poet; but to the naturalist, the lover of life for its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose leaf, who waits as thirstily as

it in a tree, too,-in a hickory tre

t, w

's b

at wakened memories in the vague twilight of more old,

e, and a home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers

would go down to the meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs; but back he would come, without mate or companion,

. He might remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresis

During the coming summer I shall mark him in some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then watch the old apple tree yonder to see if he returns. It will be a hard

of branches in the summer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the winter-down under the chips and punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be; for my toad

asleep in there. He is no longer mere toad. He has passed into the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf against worm and gru

over to sit at his feet and learn some of the things that

fortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer evening steals out with the wood-shadows and softly covers the fie

id repetition a thousand times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is gone; a bat flits sque

n taught every manner of stirring, and this strange exercise of being s

sit down and keep still and do nothing inside of me as well as outside. Of course you know how to keep still, for you are children. And so perhaps you do not need to take lessons of t

ow not what, nor need to know. So we will sit in silence, the toad and I, watching Altair burn along the shore of the horizon, and overhead Arcturus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the lea