low toadflax appropriately known as butterand-eggs, and the chicory or succory, rivalling the gentian in its exquisite shade of sky blue. August ushers in the flat-topped, reddishpurple ironweed and the old-rose-colored Joe Pye weed, both of which are conspicuously discernible by reason of their dark, ruddy coloring along the roadside, sloping down towards the branch, where they flourish with the tall brook sunflower or yellow bur-marigold and the beautiful rose-purple blooms of the prickly thistles, dangerous to handle but very pleasing to look at from a safe distance.

September shows the brilliant asters and the many species of goldenrod. October woods yield us the closed gentian, and the fringed gentian, immortalized by William Cullen Bryant:

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye Look through its fringes to the sky, Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall A flower from its cerulean wall.

November winds up the woodland floral display with the four-petaled, golden-yellow blossoms of the witch hazel, and the red twinberries of the partridge vine.

Many other beautiful and dainty wild flowers are successively observed and identified as they come within the range of our outdoor student's vision, one of his best helps in this delightfully fascinating pastime being found in Chester A. Reed's Flower Guide.

As the years go by he becomes more and more familiar with many interesting characteristics of his numerous outdoor friends, and the pictures filmed for his daily entertainment and instruction show an ever changing and charming variety.

In the spring flocks of noisy crows hold their annual convention in the pine trees and prove before and after its sessions that synonym for the straight and narrow course, "as the crow flies" is sadly a myth and a mis

nomer.

as a

The loud, fife-like whistle of the Baltimore oriole, and the sweeter, flute note of the orchard oriole, repeated again and again, are heard in the morning shortly after the blue bird's warble and the song sparrow's joyous solo.

The call-boy of the woods, however, with the possible exception of Robin Redbreast, according to our auditor's experience, seems to be the chipping sparrow, a tiny bird with a brownish-red head, whose wiry little trill is frequently heard long in advance of the rest of the woodland choir and often during the night as well.

The meadowlark's opening measure, usually identical with the first four notes of the Toreador song in the opera of Carmen, reaches the ear clear and emphatic from some far-off grassland retreat, where his mate carefully guards her four or five brown-speckled treasures cunningly hidden in the waving grasses.

The rose-breasted grosbeak, sometimes called the Virginia nightingale, and the yellow and green-breasted warblers add the beauty of their plumage to the verdure of the trees when the tender, pink baby leaves are peeping above the slender, green catkins of the white oaks and the glowing red sepals of the hickory buds are curling downward beneath their new growth of foliage.

To his lady love, the "turtle" (dove) of Scripture, the mourning dove's sad melody sweet music seems, as doubtless does the sorrowful strain of the yellow-billed cuckoo, or rain-crow, to his as easily satisfied mate.

Both birds are supposed to portend rain, but their song may be heard in all kinds of weather from morn to night.

Seated aloft on the blighted branch of a dead chestnut, whose naked limbs form an inviting perch at times for many a phoebe, kingbird or other flycatcher, the catbird pours forth a bewildering medley of song, with more or less pleasing imitations of many of his feathered neighbors, usually ending with the unmelodious mewing which accounts for this gifted songster's being known by such a prosaic name.

Later in the season the title is doubtless well deserved, for after the courting days are over and domestic duties a thing of the past the cat call is its only note.

This fact leads to the realization that the joyous ecstatic music of our songbirds is usually hushed after the honeymoon wanes and the new birdlets are launched on their own

careers.

The songster of the family is in almost every instance the male, the lady cardinal being one of the notable exceptions, although the mother notes of the catbird, and some others, are delicious bits of cooing lullabies.

The mockingbird of the south has a richer melody and a more pleasing repertoire than the catbird, but unfortunately its visits are not as frequent as might be desired, and this also applies to its close rival, the brown thrasher, sometimes called the sandy mockingbird.

The bumblebee provides himself with a home in the deserted nest of a family of field mice, and seeks his supply of honey from the lowly cloverfield.

His more discerning cousin, the honeybee, sips his nectar from the cherry blossoms in the orchard, and dreams of the wealth of sweets later to be found in the linden or basswood, the "bee tree," which Julia Ellen Rogers informs us has been the source of our finest honey since the days of the early Greeks and Romans.

While the house is screened throughout, the sleeper does not care to have a network of screens surrounding his outdoor room, and so his outlook is entirely unobstructed.

A network, indeed, is objectionable to our porch dweller, in so far as the porch is concerned, whether it is one of metal screens, or

the old-fashioned mosquito net, suspended in summer like a canopy over the bed, or anything else like what good old Dr. Johnson, in his famous dictionary, characteristically defined as "Anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections."

That, in itself, ought surely to be enough to debar it even if he did not object to having his supply of fresh air filtered through the dusty interstices between the dustier intersections.

The few mosquitoes about are satisfactorily cared for by the chimney-swifts, which some people persist in calling swallows, darting open-mouthed, morning and evening, above and around the house, like their allies, the bats, which perform the same service at night.

The solitary carpenter bee butts and buzzes against the ceiling of the porch until he finally bores a hole in the wood, and tiny bits of sawdust bear mute evidence of his unflagging energy and perseverance.

Nor far from the house several little knobs of sand and earth oppear to be the scene of considerable activity. Scores of little folk poke their black heads up out of what seem to be small tunnels, look around, crawl out and busily turn in every direction.

Closer inspection proves they are ants, but what seems unusual is that several appear to be provided with wings and fly a short distance upon emerging..

The bustle continues for a time, when some of the winged ants are seen to arise in the air and fly away.

This much the sleeper knows, for he has witnessed it more than once. But for the knowledge that those a-wing are on their wedding journey, high in the air, at the conclusion of which the useless wings are to be discarded and a new colony founded, he must depend upon hearsay, like Uncle Remus, who usually found refuge in the statement that "de tale I give you like hi't wer' gun ter me."

These ant-hills later form a favorite feasting place for the flicker or golden-winged woodpecker, whose long bill and longer, sticky tongue plays huge havoc with these underground industrial workers of the world. Little sympathy, however, need be wasted on the victims for they are destroyers themselves, and should be avoided on account of their sharp and vicious bite.

The author of Twice-told Tales, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stands at the head of American novelists, had an open-air study, built up in some white pine trees, about twenty feet from the ground, where he could commune with nature at first hand, where "Mosses from an Old Manse” might appropriately have been written, and where he could and doubtless did at times sleep outdoors as well.

portion of their romantic association in song and story to deny that they sing at all, but the sunlight shining one afternoon through the crimson rambler, on which a gray cricket had located, disclosed that the source of the socalled song was in the wings.

Following up the sound our embryo naturalist could plainly see the wings rapidly vibrating, at an angle of about 45° up over the back, the scraping together of which produced the "cricket's tricksome tune."

The call of "the shrilling locust, slowly sheathing her dagger voice," as well as that of the grasshopper and katydid, which entomologists are pleased to term the stridulation of insects, are all caused more or less by the same process, with either wings and wings, or legs and wings, as the porch watcher occasionally verified by his own observation.

Around the porch runs a small railing about a foot higher than the top of the couch, and on this railing many interesting visitors occasionally alight for a brief space or longer.

It is probable that we are as much objects of wonder, and sometimes fear, to these little people as they are to us, and the habit was therefore cultivated of remaining as motionless as possible at such times so as not to cause them any alarm.

He thus learned to distinguish the longhorned grasshopper, the "green little vaulter" of the fields, from the short-horned grasshopper, which is not a grasshopper at all but a locust.

The harvestman, "grandfather graybeard," a sort of harmless spider, with eight ridiculously long legs, was induced to walk up on the back of his hand without harm to either party.

The ladybug, with two eye-spots on her pretty, pink shell-like back, one of the fruitgrower's most valuable friends, which children delight to address as "Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children will burn," was a frequent and welcome caller, as was also her relative known as the Nine-spotted Ladybug.

Curious looking brownie bugs, or treehoppers, with odd, humped-up backs, made a grotesque addition to the railing boulevard, and even the measuring worm, whose proper food seems to be found in the apple-tree, was allowed to hump itself along its preordained way without protest.

The swiftest winged creature is said to be the short-lived, four-winged dragon-fly, or "snake-doctor," and it was soon apparent that there is no just cause for "fearing the fancied savagery of the harmless and playful rover," its savagery being chiefly employed in the destruction of myriads of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Caterpillars, however, are still viewed with aversion, even if they do later develop into beautifully winged insects, as some species, particularly the green larva with prickly spines on its back, are known to be decidedly poi

sonous.

(To be continued)

Y DEAR FRIEND:

ΜΥ

You have come upon an enemy, and have determined to conquer and destroy him. One week of your campaign has passed, it is high time that you adopt a welldefined scheme of procedure. Experience has for years been busy, and now offers you a plan, tried and proved successful. You can win your fight by the combined strategy of rest and prudent enterprise. The former does not here concern us; it is rather the province of your physician, but the latter deserves your most careful attention. First, let us understand "prudent enterprise" here to mean calm, yet constant, effort to discover and appreciate what is of value in life. Since any such effort presupposes a mental attitude favorable at the start, it will be well to discuss in this letter your present way of thinking. You will find it to be included in one of these three classes:

a

(1) Either you are still too tired to think, and no plan for the future holds any interest for you; or,

(2) The shock of your discovery has left you bewildered and frightened; or,

(3) You have carefully weighed the situation, and finding that your enemy is not invincible, have taken up the gauntlet and plunged into battle.

When the present weariness has passed, the first class will naturally resolve itself into one of the two others. Thus we have only the two attitudes to consider, and they may be summed up in Stevenson's lines:

"Two men looked out through prison bars; The one saw mud, the other stars."

If you are frightened or discouraged by the prospect before you, there should be some reason for your fear or gloom, some fearsome, depressing outlook that warrants a feeling of morbid apprehension. You believe perhaps that ahead lie long, unprofitable days of idleness, a period when, your earning power having been withdrawn, no compensation is to be realized. Certainly, that is not so. This term of peaceful meditation will be more revealing to you than any previous period of your life. For the present you have retired from the crowded, distracting rush of the world, and may taste the fruits of that unhurried thought which so clarifies the truth, so broadens and uplifts the mind.

"All very well," you may perhaps reply, "but must I not cease to be a factor of value in the world during the months when I am gaining the benefit of which you speak?"

Once again, I insist, "Certainy_not." Read these lines which that great man, Thomas Carlyle, wrote to John Sterling, his tuberculous friend:

"If you were never able to go through any active exertion, or write a single line, except an occasional letter, or to exercise any influence over mankind, except the influence of your thoughts and feelings upon your children and those by whom you are personally known and valued, you would still be, I sincerely think, the most useful man I know."

Surely, then, if you can school yourself never to whine, never to fret, always to accept your lot with a good grace, you also will serve as well, if not better than many a man who is in daily communion with men. Now that you are reassured as to your present value, let us see what is to become of you when the rest-cure is past, and you shall have returned to normal life. What is the prospect of future success? The cases of former tuberculosis patients who took up work again with subsequent success in every line of endeavor from coalheaving to art, are so numerous and have been cited so many times as almost to make one believe that in tuberculosis there is some inherent grace that moulds the character to high achievement. Before attempting to trace the possible sources of that impression, let me first tell you of a signal success that was described recently in the American Magazine. Roger Babson, of Wellesley, learned at the age of twenty-five, that he had tuberculosis;not a mild incipient case, but an extensive affection of both lungs. He had been recently married. He was far from being a Rockefeller, yet, instead of taking fright because an enemy had attacked him, he thanked God that his enemy stood revealed. Realizing clearly what he had to combat, he took to his bed, as you have taken to your bed; and he meditated calmly, as you must meditate calmly, upon the means by which he might not only overcome his disease, but also stave off impending poverty. His days of reverie soon bore fruit in the form of an idea. He began to collect and compile the monthly financial reports of American railroads. These he sold to banks in Boston. Gradually his services embraced an increased number of branches, and eventually spread to every city in the United States. Today, besides having regained his health, Roger Babson is head of a statistical organization, conceived and built by himself, which advertises as the largest of its character in the world. That business was literally born of rest. Will you agree now that the next few months can be of value to you? I said above