O greening time of bloom and song!
O fragrant days of tender pain!
The wet, the warm, the sweet young days
With robins singing in the rain.
CHAPTER XI
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ
I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the four volumes of Agassiz’s “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States.” I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster, had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are a monumental work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the turtles of the United States, and their life-history. The work was published more than half a century ago, but it looked old beyond its years—massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks; and I soon turned with a sigh from the weary learning of its plates and diagrams to look at the preface.
Then, reading down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks for help received, I came to a sentence beginning:—
“In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also received valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington; ... from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; ... and from Mr. J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro.” And then it hastens on with the thanks in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and only thing of real importance in all the world.