forced by hunger to leave the covert of his cedars, since he, on
the naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the most far-shining
and beautiful mark for Death. I stepped across to the tree in
which a pair of these birds roost and shook it, to make sure they
were at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the next
with the quick startled notes they utter when aroused.

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched
my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it
on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other.
Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times
the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side
everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through
me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across
the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go
to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.
That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising
in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before
any other dogs are in sights. And, indeed, the case is much that
of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at
every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever
snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought
like a common cur, is Man.

Among my neighbors who furnish me much of the plain prose of life,
the nearest hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner. I
called him my rain-cow, because the sound of his voice awoke
apprehensions of falling weather. A visit from him was an endless
drizzle. For Jacob came over to expound his minute symptoms; and
had everything that he gave out on the subject of human ailments