Birds, Insects, Man and Woman

T

HE blossoms and leaves of summer are rapidly filling the air with perfume and the day with shade. Over our New England hills and valleys, by the farm-houses and in the villages, the lilacs have crowded close after the cherries, peaches and pears; they have had their day of bloom and are setting their fruit. The apples also are gone by, after welcoming the orioles and the robins; the orioles no more dash sportively amid the orchard masses of blossom, but are already constructing their nests on the pendent boughs of the elms. It is a day of birds, the song sparrows by the roadside and the vesper sparrows by the brooksides, the red-wings in the marshy sedges, the bobolinks in the meadows, and over all the crows, with their wise commentary on our inferior and wicked contrivances which they behold in the fields, ready against the coming of the corn. The night-jar swings over our streets and over farmers' fields with equal vigilance, screaming as it flies, after moths and chafers-for

the chafers are now heard buzzing amid the bushes and banging against the panes,-Junebugs, or May-bees-as we call them when they come ahead of time. The gardener unearths every day these curious blundering beetles, whose grubs he will be killing later. The insect hordes are early to arrive and late to depart,-in fact, they are always with us, and it is amazing what a number of them live on the herbage and the sylvan foliage.

In the state of Nature all these inchoate races. of minor life are kept in subjection by the birds, but since of late years the birds have been slaughtered by wholesale to make women's hats hideous, the balance is lost, and hence we have plagues of elm beetles, cottony louses, and gypsy and browntailed moths. Thousands of varieties of insects have found their proper food on trees from time immemorial, and might continue to do so without reminding us of the plagues of Egypt, were it not for the women who want birds and feathers of birds on their hats. If the wearers of these slaughtered creatures of God, more beautiful and more useful than themselves, could only see how they look to a lover of Nature, or a mere enlightened farmer and fruit raiser, they would surely discard their egrets, their bird-of-Paradise plumes, their wings, and the whole birds so hideously adorn

ing their comely heads, and never wear another. Why do they proclaim themselves murderers?

As we listen to the delicious glee of the bobolink over the meadows, to the swift, bright cry of the meadow lark, or the tender sibilation of the red-winged blackbird in the swales, it seems impossible that human beings can possibly think of killing these lovely creatures, or of being accomplices after the fact in their slaughter. The other day, the sun shining ardently over the fields and forests, and drawing delicate veils of moisture from the brooks and swamps, one listening to these wild and gracious utterances of the sole and infinite Spirit could only conceive of the world of Nature as one of harmony. The several grades of life are interdependent and the less developed nurture the higher perpetually.

As for man, only he introduces a breach in the order of being, and destroys tree and flower and bird without respect to their offices, despoiling himself the worst of all. And when he is told this and it is proved to him, the moment's greed makes him shut his mind and dismiss consideration of the subject. Still his ignorant woodchoppers fell the forest, "clearing" the land, destroying the saplings as remorselessly as they cut the trees of timber or of cord wood, and ravaging the whole forest by fire. Still his railroads rush

through the land, sending out their sparks to set fires that burn over in an hour 25 or 30 acres of young forest and rob him of all their promise. What has man been given reason for? Apparently to make a dollar to-day, forgetting that generations are to come after him to whom his dollar will be valueless because long since expended, and whom his destruction of the very sources of life has left poor indeed. No, man does not use his reason, with even his self-interest, except for the bare moment. Obloquy has settled over more than one generation in the history of man for the cause which was expressed in the phrase of the Bourbon society of France before its great Revolution-" After us, the deluge." There is too much of this in even our civilization, though the motto is not avowed. What the earth is to render, what society is to become, when we are gone, these things are not sufficiently regarded by the present generation.

Let us try to escape from these difficult and dispiriting thoughts. Let us leave the city, in these opening days of summer, forget its paved streets and its clouds of black smoke clogging the free air of God, and visit those precincts where yet Nature reigns. It is long ere we reach those unpolluted places. But once among the undisputed tracts, where streets are not yet laid out,

there is revival of native and intimate sympathies. The great oaks, so noble a feature of our surrounding country, are past their period of blossoming, and no longer delight earth with those exquisite variations of colour in the young foliage of these monarchs of the forest, so great a matter of wonder, showing us how consistent is strength with beauty. 'Tis no slight matter that a rugged, robust oak should blossom in graceful tasseling and leaf in exceeding delicacy of pink and buff and cream tints, making the woodland a parterre of rare and fine harmonies, with the maples behind in their clear, translucent greens, and the somber pines, just lightened by the new bright growth, like thrusts of kindling sunshine. Now beneath these shades the solemn quietude of an infinite, primitive, remote age is gathering,—an age when man was not, and when forests rose in majesty and lived their long lives, and the aged fell and their physical decay nourished their successors. That far gone time renews itself to one who enters these sacred precincts in sympathy with Nature. Here yet the sense of essential life resides, and temporary and conditional living recedes. The spirit of the universe does not desert the forest shades. The ceaseless hurry of our semi-civilization is left behind, and the healthful recovery of repose succeeds.