top of a dry tree above me and came sailing directly over my head.
I saw him bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of
his plumage, as if the web off every quill in his great wings vibrated
in his strong, level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could
hold him. When he was fairly clear of the mountain he began that
sweeping spiral movement in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went
without once breaking his majestic poise till be appeared to sight some
far-off alien geography, when he bent his course thitherward and
gradually vanished in the blue depths. The eagle is a bird of large
ideas, he embraces long distances; the continent is his home. I never
look upon one without emotion; I follow him with my eye as long as
I can. I think of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains,
of the wild and sounding sea-coast. The waters are his, and the woods
and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces behind the veil of the storm,
and his joy is height and depth and vast spaces.

We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in the edge of the woods,
and are lucky to find a single scarlet lobelia lingering there.
It seems almost to light up the gloom with its intense bit of color.
Beside a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue lobelia
(Lobelia syphilitica), and near it amid the weeds and wild grasses and
purple asters the most beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed
gentian. What a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the
gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings. It does not lure
the bee, but it lures and holds every passing human eye. If we strike
through the corner of yonder woods, where the ground is moistened by
hidden springs and where there is a little opening amid the trees,
we shall find the closed gentian, a rare flower in this locality.
I had walked this way many times before I chanced upon its retreat;
and then I was following a line of bees. I lost the bees but I got the