ainst a bird's behaving
mysteriously, I suppose. Most of us, I am sure, often do things which
are inexplicable to ourselves, and once in a very great while, perhaps,
it would puzzle even our next-door neighbors to render a complete
account of our motives.

Whatever the robin meant, however, and no doubt there was some good
reason for his conduct, he had given my curiosity the needed jog. Now,
at last, I would do what I had often dreamed of doing,--learn something
about the birds of my own region, and be able to recognize at least the
more common ones when I saw them.

The interest of the study proved to be the greater for my ignorance,
which, to speak within bounds, was nothing short of wonderful; perhaps I
might appropriately use a more fashionable word, and call it phenomenal.
All my life long I had had a kind of passion for being out-of-doors;
and, to tell the truth, I had been so often seen wandering by myself in
out-of-the-way wood-paths, or sitting idly about on stone walls in
lonesome pastures, that some of my Philistine townsmen had most likely
come to look upon me as no better than a vagabond. Yet I was not a
vagabond, for all that. I liked work, perhaps, as well as the generality
of people. But I was unfortunate in this respect: while I enjoyed
in-door work, I hated to be in the house; and, on the other hand, while
I enjoyed being out-of-doors, I hated all manner of out-door
employment. I was not lazy, but I possessed--well, let us call it the
true aboriginal temperament; though I fear that this distinction will be
found too subtile, even for the well-educated, unless, along with their
education, they have a certain sympathetic bias, which, after all, is
the main thing to be depended on in such nice psychological
discriminations.

With all my rovings in wood and field, however, I knew nothing of any
open-air study. Study was a thing of books. At school we were never
taught to look elsewhere for knowledge. Reading and spelling, geography
and grammar, arithmetic and algebra, geometry and trigonometry,--these
were studied, of course, as also were Latin and Greek. But none of our
lessons took us out of the school-room, unless it was astronomy, the
study of which I had nearly forgotten; and that we pursued in the
night-time, when birds and plants were as though they were not. I cannot
recollect that any one of my teachers ever called my attention to a
natural object. It seems incredible, but, so far as my memory