ps
become a denizen of the trees; I had never seen him in this new role.
But this season, having hylas in mind, or rather being ripe for them, I
several times came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some bushes,
I captured two. They leaped before me as doubtless they had done many
times before; but though I was not looking for or thinking of them, yet
they were quickly recognized, because the eye had been commissioned
to find them. On another occasion, not long afterward, I was hurriedly
loading my gun in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a gray
squirrel that was fast escaping through the tree-tops, when one of these
lilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me.
I saw him only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because I
had already made him my own.

Nevertheless, the habit of observation is the habit of clear and
decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady
deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things
discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot,
to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter
picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a
rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only
form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty
which they call individuality--that which separates, discriminates, and
sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary
to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes
specific points and differences,--it seizes upon and preserves the
individuality of the thing. Persons frequently describe to me some bird
they have seen or heard and ask me to name it, but in most cases the
bird might be any one of a dozen, or else it is totally unlike any bird
found in this continent. They have either seen falsely or else vaguely.
Not so the farm youth who wrote me one winter day that he had seen a
single pair of strange birds, which he describes as follows: "They were
about the size of the 'chippie,' the tops of their heads were red, and
the breast of the male was of the same color, while that of the female
was much lighter; their rumps were also faintly tinged with red. If I
have described them so that you would know them, please write me their
names." There can be little doubt but the young observer had seen a pair
of red-polls,--a bird related to the goldfin