my novel fish had been recognized and worthily named; the title
conferred a new dignity at once; but when the learned man added that
it was familiarly called the "fairy shrimp," I felt a deeper pleasure.
Fairy-like it certainly was, in its aerial, unsubstantial look, and in
its delicate, down-like means of locomotion; but the large head, with
its curious folds, and its eyes standing out in relief, as if on the
heads of two pins, were gnome-like. Probably the fairy wore a mask,
and wanted to appear terrible to human eyes. Then the creatures had
sprung out of the earth as by magic. I found some in a furrow in a
plowed field that had encroached upon a swamp. In the fall the plow
had been there, and had turned up only the moist earth; now a little
water was standing there, from which the April sunbeams had invoked
these airy, fairy creatures. They belong to the crustaceans, but
apparently no creature has so thin or impalpable a crust; you can
almost see through them; certainly you can see what they have had for
dinner, if they have eaten substantial food.

[Illustration: BY THE STUDY FIRE]

All we know about the private and essential natural history of the
bees, the birds, the fishes, the animals, the plants, is the result of
close, patient, quick-witted observation. Yet Nature will often elude
one for all his pains and alertness. Thoreau, as revealed in his
journal, was for years trying to settle in his own mind what was the
first thing that stirred in spring, after the severe New England
winter,--in what was the first sign or pulse of returning life
manifest; and he never seems to have been quite sure. He could not get
his salt on the tail of this bird. He dug into the swamps, he peered
into the water, he felt with benumbed hands for the radical leaves of
the plants under the snow; he inspected the buds on the willows, the
catkins on the alders; he went out before daylight of a March morning
and remained out after dark; he watched the lichens and mosses on the
rocks; he listened for the birds; he was on the alert for the first
frog ("Can you be absolutely sure," he says, "that you have heard the
first frog that croaked in the township?"); he stuck a pin here and he
stuck a pin there, and there, and still he could not satisfy himself.
Nor can any one. Life appears to start in several things
simultaneously. Of a warm thawy day in February the snow is suddenly
covered with myriads of snow fleas looking like black, new