I was only a small lad. I knew the different bumblebees, and had
made a collection of their combs and honey before I had entered my
teens. I had watched the little frogs, the hylas, and had captured
them and held them till they piped sitting in my hand. I had
watched the leaf-cutters and followed them to their nests in an old
rail, or under a stone. I see that I early had an interest in the
wild life about me that my brothers did not have. I was a natural
observer from childhood, had a quick, sure eye and ear, and an
eager curiosity. I loved to roam the hills and woods and prowl
along the streams, just to come in contact with the wild and the
adventurous. I was not sent to Sunday-school, but was allowed
to spend the day as I saw fit, provided I did not carry a gun or
a fishing-rod. Indeed, the foundation of my knowledge of the
ways of the wild creatures was laid when I was a farm boy, quite
unconscious of the natural-history value of my observations.

What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this
direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I
got it through literature, and more especially through the works
of Audubon, when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.

The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in the best modern
literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it. I was
early drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau,
and to the nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my
natural-history tastes were stimulated by them.

I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the
schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping
and prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing,