CHAPTER X
TO THE TEACHER
Perhaps you are in a crowded school-room in the heart of a great city. What can you do for your pupils there? But what can’t you do? You have a bit of sky, a window surely, an old tin can for earth, a sprig of something to plant—and surely you have English sparrows behind the rain pipe or shutter! You may have the harbor too, and water-front with its gulls and fish, and the fish stores with their windows full of the sea. You have the gardens and parks, burial-grounds and housetops, bird stores, museums—why, bless you, you have the hand-organ man and his monkey; you have—but I have mentioned enough. It is a hungry little flock that you have to feed, too, and no teacher can ask more.
FOR THE PUPIL
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An English sparrow: Make a long and careful study of the sparrows that nest about you. If you live in the country try to drive them away from the bluebird house and the martin-boxes. The author does not advise boys and girls to do any killing, but carefully pulling down a sparrow’s nest with eggs in it—if you are sure it is a sparrow’s nest—is kindness, he believes, to the other, more useful birds. Yet only yesterday, August 17th, he saw a male sparrow bring moth after moth to its young in a hole in one of the timbers of a bridge from which the author was fishing. It is not easy to say just what our duty is in this matter.
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clack of a guinea going to roost: The guinea-fowl as it goes to roost frequently sets up a clacking that can be heard half a mile away.
an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston: The cemetery was the historic King’s Chapel on Tremont Street, Boston. Some of the elm trees have since been cut down.
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Cubby Hollow: a small pond near the author’s boyhood home, running, after a half-mile course through the woods, into Lupton’s Pond, which falls over a dam into the meadows of Cohansey Creek.
on the water: What water is it that surrounds so large a part of the City of Boston?
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the shuttered buildings: Along some of the streets, especially in the wholesale district, the heavy iron shutters, closed against the high walls of the buildings, give the deserted streets a solemn, almost a forbidding aspect.
facing the wind: like an anchored boat, offering the least possible resistance to the storm.
out of doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down a crowded city street: Opportunities for watching the wild things, for seeing and hearing the things of nature, cannot be denied you even in the heart of the city, if you have an eye for such things. Read Bradford Torrey’s “Birds on Boston Common,” or the author’s “Birds from a City Roof” in the volume called “Roof and Meadow.”