having the flying squirrels, father and mother and halfgrown young, in their nest among the rafters; and at night we slept so soundly that we did not in the least mind the wild gambols of the little fellows through the rooms, 5 even when, as sometimes happened, they would swoop down to the bed and scuttle across it.

One April I went to Yellowstone Park, when the snow was still very deep, and I took John Burroughs with me. I wished to show him the big game of the Park, the wild 10 creatures that have become so astonishingly tame and tolerant of human presence. In the Yellowstone the animals seem always to behave as one wishes them to! It is always possible to see the sheep and deer and antelope, and also the great herds of elk, which are shyer than 15 the smaller beasts. In April we found the elk weak after the short commons and hard living of winter. Once without much difficulty I regularly rounded up a big band of them, so that John Burroughs could look at them. I do not think, however, that he cared to see them as much as 20 I did. The birds interested him more, especially a tiny owl the size of a robin which we saw perched on the top of a tree in mid-afternoon entirely uninfluenced by the sun and making a queer noise like a cork being pulled from a bottle. I was rather ashamed to find how much better 25 his eyes were than mine in seeing the birds and grasping their differences.

When wolf-hunting in Texas, and when bear-hunting in Louisiana and Mississippi, I was not only enthralled by the sport, but also by the strange new birds and other 30 creatures, and the trees and flowers I had not known before. By the way, there was one feast at the White House which stands above all others in my memory-even above the

time when I lured Joel Chandler Harris° thither for a night, a deed in which to triumph, as all who knew that inveterately shy recluse will testify. This was "the bear-hunters' dinner." I had been treated so kindly by my friends on these hunts, and they were such fine fellows, men whom I 5 was so proud to think of as Americans, that I set my heart on having them at a hunters' dinner at the White House. One December I succeeded; there were twenty or thirty of them, all told, as good hunters, as daring riders, as first-class citizens as could be found anywhere; no finer 10 set of guests ever sat at meat in the White House; and among other game on the table was a black bear, itself contributed by one of these same guests.

O

When I first visited California, it was my good fortune to see the "big trees," the Sequoias, and then to travel 15 down into the Yosemite with John Muir. Of course of all people in the world he was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite. He told me that when Emerson came to California he tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only 20 way in which to see at their best the majesty and charm of the Sierras. But at the time Emerson was getting old and could not go. John Muir met me with a couple of packers and two mules to carry our tent, bedding, and food for a three days' trip. The first night was clear, and 25 we lay down in the darkening isles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in 30 the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn. I was interested and a little surprised to find

that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them. The hermit thrushes meant nothing to him, the trees and the flowers and the cliffs everything. The only birds he no5 ticed or cared for were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-ousels-always particular favorites of mine too. The second night we camped in a snow-storm, on the edge of the canyon walls, under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver firs; and next day we went down 10 into the wonderland of the valley itself. I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir and in the Yellowstone with John Burroughs.

Our most beautiful singers are the wood thrushes; they sing not only in the early morning but throughout the 15 long, hot June afternoons. Sometimes they sing in the trees immediately around the house, and if the air is still we can always hear them from among the tall trees at the foot of the hill. The thrashers sing in the hedgerows beyond the garden, the catbirds everywhere. The catbirds have 20 such an attractive song that it is extremely irritating to know that at any moment they may interrupt it to mew and squeal. The bold, cheery music of the robins always seems typical of the bold, cheery birds themselves. The Baltimore orioles nest in the young elms around the house, 25 and the orchard orioles in the apple trees near the garden and outbuildings. Among the earliest sounds of spring is the cheerful, simple, homely song of the song-sparrow; and in March we also hear the piercing cadence of the meadowlark-to us one of the most attractive of all bird calls. Of 30 late years now and then we hear the rollicking, bubbling melody of the bobolink in the pastures back of the barn;

and when the full chorus of these and of many other of the singers of spring is dying down, there are some true hotweather songsters, such as the brightly hued indigo buntings and thistle-finches. Among the finches one of the most musical and plaintive songs is that of the bush-5 sparrow- -I do not know why the books call it fieldsparrow, for it does not dwell in the open fields like the vesper-finch, the savannah-sparrow, and the grasshoppersparrow, but among the cedars and bayberry bushes and young locusts in the same places where the prairie war- 10 bler is found. Nor is it only the true songs that delight us. We love to hear the flickers call, and we readily pardon any one of their number which, as occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof. In our ears the red-winged 15 blackbirds have a very attractive note. We love the screaming of the red-tailed hawks as they soar high overhead, and even the calls of the night heron that nest in the tall water maples by one of the wood ponds on our place, and the little green herons that nest beside the salt marsh. 20 It is hard to tell just how much of the attraction in any bird-note lies in the music itself and how much in the associations. This is what makes it so useless to try to compare the bird songs of one country with those of another. A man who is worth anything can no more be entirely 25 impartial in speaking of the bird-songs with which from his earliest childhood he has been familiar than he can be entirely impartial in speaking of his own family.

At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things-birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses 30 and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life. We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs roar and

crackle during the long winter evenings. The big piazza is for the hot, still afternoons of summer.

The books are everywhere. There are as many in the north room and in the parlor is drawing-room a more 5 appropriate name than parlor?-as in the library; the gunroom at the top of the house, which incidentally has the loveliest view of all, contains more books than any of the other rooms; and they are particularly delightful books to browse among, just because they have not much rele10 vance to one another, this being one of the reasons why they are relegated to their present abode. But the books have overflowed into all the other rooms too.

I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered. Books are almost as individual as 15 friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the book-lover's besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe° calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," taking the shape 20 of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books. Of course there are books which a man or woman uses as instruments of a profession-law books, medical books, cookery books, and the like. I am not speaking of these, for they are not properly "books" at 25 all; they come in the category of time-tables, telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life. I am speaking of books that are meant to be read. Personally, granted that these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand that they all submit is that of 30 being interesting. If the book is not interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of cases it