here again the trouble is to
get hold of the tail at the right moment--and, I may add, to let go of
it at the right moment.

Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures is what every man
possesses who is alike gentle in his approach to them. Bradford Torrey
succeeded, after a few experiments, in so dispelling the fears of an
incubating red-eyed vireo that she would take insect food from his
hand, and I have known several persons to become so familiar with the
chickadees that they would feed from the hand, and in some instances
even take food from between the lips. If you have a chipmunk for a
neighbor, you may soon become on such intimate terms with him that he
will search your pockets for nuts and sit on your knee and shoulder
and eat them. But why keep alive and circulate as truth these animal
legends of the prescientific ages?

Thoreau was not a born naturalist, but a born supernaturalist. He was
too intent upon the bird behind the bird always to take careful note
of the bird itself. He notes the birds, but not too closely. He was at
times a little too careless in this respect to be a safe guide to the
bird-student. Even the saunterer to the Holy Land ought to know the
indigo bunting from the black-throated blue warbler, with its languid,
midsummery, "Zee, zee, zee-eu."

Many of his most interesting natural-history notes Thoreau got from
his farmer friends--Melvin, Minott, Miles, Hubbard, Wheeler. Their
eyes were more single to the life around them than were his; none of
them had lost a hound, a turtle-dove, and a bay horse, whose trail
they were daily in quest of.

A haunter of swamps and river marshes all his life, he had never yet
observed how the night bittern made its booming or pumping sound, but
accepted the explanation of one of his neighbors that it was produced
by the bird thrusting its bill in water, sucking up as much as it
could hold, and then pumping it out again with four or five heaves of
the neck, throwing the water two or three feet--in fact, turning
itself into a veritable pump! I have stood within a few yards of the
bird when it made the sound, and seen the convulsive movement of the
neck and body, and the lifting of the head as the sound escaped. The
bird seems literally to vomit up its notes, but it does not likewise
emit water.

Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he read Thoreau's
statement, made in his paper on the natural history of Massachusetts,
that "when the snow lies light