udubon! He succeeded; we study his
early failures. The world never studies the failures of those who
do not succeed in the end.

The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also--his mind
once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions!
How fine we should all look if every August the old plumage of our
natures would drop out and be blown away, and fresh quills take the
vacant places! But we have one set of feathers to last us through
our threescore years and ten--one set of spotless feathers, which
we are told to keep spotless through all our lives in a dirty world.
If one gets broken it stays; if one gets blackened, nothing will
cleanse it. No doubt we shall all fly home at last, like a flock
of pigeons that were once turned loose snow-white from the sky, and
made to descend and fight one another and fight everything else for
a poor living amid soot and mire. If then the hand of the unseen
Fancier is stretched forth to draw us in, how can he possibly
smite any one of us, or cast us away, because we came back to him
black and blue with bruises and besmudged and bedraggled past all
recognition?

IX

To-day, the 7th of September, I made a discovery. The pair of
red-birds that built in my cedar-trees last winter got duly away
with the brood. Several times during summer rambles I cast my eye
about, but they were not to be seen. Early this afternoon I struck
out across the country towards a sinkhole in a field two miles away,
some fifty yards in diameter, very deep, and enclosed by a fence.
A series of these circular basins, at regular distances apart, runs
across the country over there, suggesting the remains of ancient
earth-works. The bottom had dropped out of this one, probably
communicating with the many caves that are characteristic of this
blue limestone.

Within the fence everything is an impenetrable thicket of weeds and
vines--blackberry, thistle, ironweed, pokeweed, elder, golden-rod.
As I drew near, I saw two or three birds dive down, with the shy way
they have at this season; and when I came to the edge, everything
was quiet. But I threw a stone at a point where the tangle was deep,
and there was a great fluttering and scattering of the pretenders.
And then occurred more than I had looked for. The stone had
hardly struck the brush when what looked like a tongue of vermilion
flame leaped forth near by, and, darting across, stuck itself out
of sight in the green vine