TO
MY WIFE AND THE WEE BOY
WHO HAVE MADE AND SHARED
THE PASTURE SUNSHINE
CONTENTS
| Page | |
| Waylaying the Dawn | [ 1] |
| Stalking the Wild Grape | [ 25] |
| The Frog Rendezvous | [ 47] |
| A Butterfly Chase | [ 69] |
| Down Stream | [ 89] |
| Brook Magic | [ 109] |
| In the Ponkapoag Bogs | [ 131] |
| Some Butterfly Friends | [ 151] |
| The Resting Time of the Birds | [ 173] |
| The Pond at Low Tide | [ 193] |
| How the Rain Came | [ 215] |
ILLUSTRATIONS
| He was still sitting on his perch greeting the gold of the morning sun with melodious uproar | [ Frontispiece] |
| OPPOSITE PAGE | |
| The fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop | [ 6] |
| The mother bird, dancing and mincing along | [ 38] |
| Out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a veritable queen of the fairies | [ 64] |
| There was the swish of wings, the snip-snap of a bird’s beak, and it was all over | [ 86] |
| The way of the “kiver” is this. There is a single, snappy, business-like bob, then another, then three in quick succession | [ 96] |
| That such things are not seen oftener is simply because people are dull and go to bed instead of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight of a full moon | [ 114] |
| Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the muskrat grubbing roots there ... and hear his snort and splash when he dives at sudden sight of you | [ 142] |
| Every boy who knows the country in summer knows him by his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered wings with their black veins | [ 160] |
| The English sparrow has the true instincts of the browbeating coward | [ 180] |
| The skunk doesn’t know where he is going and he isn’t even on his way | [ 198] |
| My lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped his head back a little, swelled his white throat, and whistled | [ 222] |
WAYLAYING THE DAWN
WAYLAYING THE DAWN
THE most beautiful place which can be found on earth of a June morning is a New England pasture, and fortunate are we New Englanders who love the open in the fact that, whatever town or city may be our home, the old-time pastures lie still at our very doors.
The way to the one that I know best lies through the yard of an old, old house, a yard that stands hospitably always open. It swings along by the ancient barn and turns a right angle by a worn-out field. Then you enter an old lane leading to what has been for more than a century a cow pasture. Here the close-cropped turf is like a lawn between the gray and mossy old stone fences that the farmer of a century and more gone grubbed from the rocky fields and made into metes and bounds. There they stand to-day, just as he set them, grim mementos of toil which the softening hand of time has made beautiful. Where cattle still travel such lanes day by day these walls are undecorated, but many of the lanes are untraveled and have been so these fifty years. Such are garlanded with woodbine, sentineled by red cedars, and fragrant with the breath of wild rose, azalea, and clethra.
Side by side with this lawn-like lane is another which was once traversed by the cattle of the next farm, but which has not been used for a lifetime. In this the wild things of the wood are untrammeled, save by one another, and they hold it in riotous possession. Just as the first lane is tame and sleek this other is wild and unkempt. The raspberry and blackberry tangle catches you by the leg if you enter, as if to hold you until birch and alder, cedar and sassafras, look you over and decide whether or not you are of their lodge. If you give them the right grip you may pass. If not, you will be well switched and scratched before you are allowed to go on.