AUTUMN.
AARRE,
October 7, 1890.
I had intended to send a few observations upon the wild-goose to Nature, but since they have extended to quite a long letter, they go to Dagbladet. It is not because I believe that they represent anything new that no one has observed before; but I know how thoughtlessly most of us let the sun shine, and the birds fly, without any idea of what a refreshment it is for a man's soul to understand what he sees in Nature, and how interesting animal life becomes when we have once learned that there is a method and a thought in every single thing that the animal undertakes, and what a pleasure it is to discover this thought, and trace the beautiful reasoning power which is Nature's essence.
And thus most of us go through life, and down into a hole in the ground like moles, without having taken any notice of the bird that flew or the bill that sang. We believe that the small birds are sparrows, the larger probably crows; barndoor fowls are the only ones we know definitely.
I met a lady the other day who was extremely indignant about this. She had asked the man at whose house she was staying—a very intelligent peasant—what kind of bird it was that she had seen in the fields. It was evident that it was a thrush—merely a common thrush—and she described the bird to him: it was about half as large as a pigeon, gray and speckled with yellow; it hopped in the fields, and so on.
'Would it be the bird they call a swallow?' suggested the man.
'Not at all,' replied the lady angrily. 'I rather think it was a kind of thrush.'