Drag home the stingy harvest, and no more
The feathered gleaners follow to your door?

What! would you rather see the incessant stir
Of insects in the windrows of the hay,
And hear the locust and the grasshopper
Their melancholy hurdy-gurdies play?
Is this more pleasant to you than the whir
Of meadow lark, and its sweet roundelay,
Or twitter of little fieldfares, as you take
Your nooning in the shade of bush and brake?

You call them thieves and pillagers; but know
They are the winged wardens of your farms,
Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe,
And from your harvests keep a hundred harms;
Even the blackest of them all, the crow,
Renders good service as your man-at-arms,
Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail,
And crying havoc on the slug and snail.

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW, _The Birds of Killingworth_

INDEX

Abandoned farms, 52.
Acacia tree, gum arabic made from, 95.
Adobe soil, 58.
AEolian soil, 66.
Africa, need for protection of animals in, 180.
Agassiz Associations, work of, 207.
Air, importance of pure, 10.
Alaska, protection of fish in waters about, 170.
Alkali soil, 59.
Alluvial soil, 64.
Animals, the first domestic, 5;
careless destruction of, 12, 49;
court of birds and, 188-194;
predatory, 203.
Antelope, disappearance of, 179;
in Yellowstone Park, 205.
Appalachian Forest, the, 133-134.
Arabs, life of the, 25.
Arbor Day, celebration of, 210;
Argentine ant, a plague, 153.
Australia, rabbits as pests in, 152.
Aztec Indians, 20.