Part 25 (1/2)

[28] That's the na He's a falishood book when he feels like it

[Illustration: _Fros, butterflies and Beetles,” by Dan Beard By permission of J B Lippincott_

IF BEETLES WERE AS BIG AS BOYS

Our six-footed brothers are wonderfully strong in proportion to their size, and it would go hard with us if beetles, for exa as boys]

Do you knohat I felt like saying, back there in Chapter IX, ere speaking of kingfishers, and how certain parties had given it out that kingfishers eat big fish that otherwise ht with a hook or a seine? This is what I _felt_ like saying:

”What if they do? Who's got a better right?”

Then they'd say--these men--I suppose:

”Why, _we_ have; _we're_ sportsmen!”

”Oh, yes,” I'd say, ”you're the kind of sports before you do; particularly if that so that way and only takes what it needs for its faood-natured about it, ht in on and ordered out, Cousin Woodchuck, for instance

”The woodchuck can no h he ades, in case he has to run for it--a space of the very best fodder than the British peasant can see the right of shutting hi his under, or creeps through, the fence, and round for hihs, as he listens from a hole in the wall or under a stuood Saxon but badhihbors”

II THE SCHOOL OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS

I don't hts in his own fields, and that he should turn everything over to the woodchuck and the rest, but I do hts and that there is a lot ot out of the theleworm, the birds and the woodchucks, the little lichens and the big trees, the winds and the rains, are all teachers in the Great School of Out-of-Doors, and in this school you can learn al there is to be learned It's really a university Nature study, as you call it in the grades, besides all the facts it teaches you, trains the eye to see, and the ear to listen, and the brain to reason, and the heart to feel

STORY OF THE LONDON BANKER AND HIS ANTS

[Illustration: SIR JOHN LUBBOCK

The great London banker who carried ants in his pocket]

Once there was a London banker who used to go around with--what do you think--in his pockets? Money? Yes, I suppose so; but what else? You'll never guess--ants! He was a lot more interested in ants than he was inbanker, all the scientific world knew hireat naturalist He wrote not only nature books but other books, including one on ”The Pleasures of Life,”

and areatest pleasures he placed the ”friendshi+p,” as he puts it, of things in Nature He said he never went into the woods but he found hilad co to tell And, in speaking of the wide-spread growth of interest in Nature in recent years, he said:

”The study of natural history indeed, seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily, I think, termed 'sport'”

And isn't it curious, when one co a beautiful deer fall dead with a bullet in its heart? You'd think there would be sohim run--the very poetry of motion Or, why should a boy want to kill a little bird? You'd think it would have been so ht or to listen to the happy notes pour out fro noother animals that this banker naturalist studied was man himself; man when he was even more of an animal than he is to-day, and he ca instinct is a survival of the long ages when looht fell o'er the plain And thered o'er the river bed, He h the moonlit wastes, Loud answered his kith and kin; Fro in