Wake-Robin

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N TO RIVERS

nderstand each other very well already. I have offered myself as his guide to certain matters out of doors, and to a few matters indoor, and he has accepted me upon my own terms, and has, on the whole been b

still others. When asked how many there are, I often have to stop and count them up. I suppose the mother of a large family does not have to count up her children to say how many there are. She sees their faces all before

the world, is not an easy matter. The author's relation to his book is a little more direct and personal, after all, more a matter of will and choice, than a father's relation to his child. The book does not change, and, whatever it fortunes, it remains to the end what its author made it. The son is an evolution out of a long line of ancestry, and one's r

ishing, or camping, or canoeing, and new literary material has been the result. My corn has grown while I loitered or slept. The writing of the book

e. My first book, "Wake-Robin," was written while I was a government clerk in Washington. It enabled me to live over again the days I had passed with the birds and in the scenes of my youth. I wrote the book sitting at a desk in front of an iron wall. I was the keeper of a vault in which many millions of bank-notes were stored. During my lon

heights beyond, and I have exchanged the vault for a vineyard. Probably my mind reacted more vigorously from the former than it does from the l

e blotted out the landscape, and I find that it is in this season that my mind dwells most fondly upon

till I try to share it with my reader. The heat of composition brings out the color and the flavor. We must not forget the illusions of all art. If my reader thinks he does not get from Nature what I get from her, let me remind him that he can hardly know wh

of her own and imparts to it her own quality; she reduces the water and adds to it a minute drop of formic acid. It is this drop of herself that gives the delicious sting to her sweet. The bee is therefore the type of the true poet, the tr

lives. The more and the fresher the facts the better. I can do nothing without them, but I mus

her out; it is to have an emotional intercourse with her, abso

t is doubtful if my reader is interested. But if I relate the bird in some way to human life, to my own life,-show what it

.