feed the very currents of our being. As a child I think I
must have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that
my affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and
thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all men
experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or fade away,
more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a real and lasting
possession.

When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write about
the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of the farm
boy within me to get at the main things about the common ones. I had
unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life and warmth to my
page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of all the pages in which
he is latent as well as visibly active, and you have robbed them of
something vital and fundamental, you have taken from the soil much of
its fertility. At least, so it seems to me, though in this business of
self-analysis I know one may easily go far astray. It is probably
quite impossible correctly to weigh and appraise the many and complex
influences and elements that have entered into one's life.

When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical
borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can
see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have much
significance. One is the impression made upon me by a redbird which the
"hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a pail of chips.
She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground. That vivid bit of
color in the form of a bird has never faded from my mind, though I could
not have been more than three or four years old.

Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin,"
in the chapter called "The Invitation,"--the vision of the small bluish
bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was six or seven
years old, while roaming with my brothers in the "Deacon woods" near
home. The memory of that bird stuck to me as a glimpse of a world of
birds that I knew not of.

Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must have
occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an older boy
neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods when a brown
bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front of us. "A brown
thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless either the veery, or the
hermit thrus