creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased,
amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects, and plays she
invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one
object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of
made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching
fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird
with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the
inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an
ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."

She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree for
her very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes and
lettuce when the gardening was done; and before these had time to
sprout she set the same beds full of spring flowers, and so
followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds,
locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into
the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught
me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our
protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of
Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected.
From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely
careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth
when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird,
and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the
spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I
knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping
bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened
at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the
feet of the mother bird."