CHAPTER V
TO THE TEACHER
Let this chapter be read very close to the Christmas recess, when your children’s minds are full of Christmas thoughts. This unconventional turn to the woods, this thought of Christmas among the animals and birds, might easily be the means of awakening many to an understanding of the deeper, spiritual side of nature-study—that we find in Nature only what we take to her; that we get back only what we give. It will be easy for them to take the spirit of Christmas into the woods because they are so full of it; and so it will be easy for them to feel the woods giving it back to them—the very last and best reward of nature-study. No, don’t be afraid that they are incapable of such lessons, of such thoughts and emotions. Some few may be; but no teacher ever yet erred by too much faith in the capacity of her pupils for the higher, deeper things.
FOR THE PUPIL
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These lines of poetry you all know. But who can tell who wrote them? Where did he live and when?
gum swamp: See description of such a swamp on pages 262-263 of the author’s “Wild Life Near Home.” This is the tree known as sour gum, more properly tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica or uniflora).
cardinal grosbeak: Commonly called “cardinal,” or “redbird.”
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Holy Day: What was the oldest form of our word “holiday”?
ilex: Ilex verticillata, the black alder, or winterberry, one of the holly family. A low swamp bush covered with red berries all winter.
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Lupton’s Pond: A little pond along Cohansey Creek near Bridgeton, N. J.
Persimmon trees: found from New Haven, Conn., to Florida.
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Bob Cratchit’s goose: There never was such a goose, as you all know who have read Dickens’s “Christmas Carol.”
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liquid amber: The balsamic juice of the sweet gum tree, sometimes called “bilsted” (Liquidambar styraciflua), a large, beautiful swamp tree found from Connecticut to Florida and west to Texas.
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half-human tracks: Because the coon is a relative of the bears and has a long hind foot that leaves a track much like that of a small baby.
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tupelo: See note on gum swamp, page 141.
sour gums: same as tupelo.
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chicken or frost grapes: Vitis cordifolia: the smallest, sourest, best (boy standards) of all our wild grapes. They ripen after the frost and feed the boys and birds when all other such fruits have gone from the woods.
Smooth winterberry: is really another ilex, Ilex lævigata, a larger bush than Ilex verticillata, the black alder or winterberry.
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Fox sparrows: See the frontispiece. The largest, most beautiful of our sparrows. Nests in the Far North. A migrant to New England and the Southern States.
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The crows were winging over toward their great roost: Don’t fail this winter to spend, if not Christmas Day, then one of your Christmas vacation days, in the woods, from morning until the crows go over to their roost. You will never forget that day.