essening its value as a fact. He does not deceive
himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him is always
holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers in this field, he
is the one upon whom we can always depend to be intellectually honest.
He has an abiding hankering after the true, the genuine, the real;
cannot stand, and never could stand, any tampering with the truth. Had
he been Cromwell's portrait painter, he would have delighted in his
subject's injunction: "Paint me as I am, mole and all." And he would
have made the mole interesting; he has done so, but that is a mole of
another color.

This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it when he
sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has no patience and
scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of blinking facts,--those
natural-history romancers who, realizing that "the crowd must have
emphatic warrant," are not content with the infinite Variety of nature,
but must needs spend their art in the wasteful and ridiculous excess of
painting the lily, perfuming the violet, and giving to the rainbow an
added hue. Accordingly, when one warps the truth to suit his purpose,
especially in the realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams
to raise a warning voice--"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!" But
he never cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and
generous praise to deserving ones.

It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is by
nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or man, much
less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is traduced--for he
shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of the mother bird
when her young are attacked. He won't suffer even a porcupine to be
misrepresented without bristling up in its defense.

I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral twist to
his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances where he does
do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks of the calmness
and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows or kingbirds: "He seldom
deigns to notice his noisy and furious antagonist, but deliberately
wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his
pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original,
this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent--rising to heights
where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I'm