Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 8

DID it ever come into your head that you were going to like something from merely hearing its name? When I was convalescing from an illness in my youth it occurred to me that I wanted a charlotte russe. I had never seen or tasted one of those confections; I hardly knew it from an oyster; but I longed for it—because I did. Invalids have that privilege. My parents went to a baker and had one made. It was one quart in content, and I ate it greedily to the last crumb, and have never cared much for charlotte russe since. Sometimes this gustatory exploit recurs to me when I find myself desiring with an equal ardor of sympathy or curiosity to own some object of natural interest or beauty. There was a crystal of epidote, ​for instance, that had to be got for my little group of minerals, Why epidote more than rhodonite or dioptase, I do not know, unless it be that the name happened to be remembered from seeing a labeled specimen in childhood.

And so it was with the trillium. I had never seen one, yet I cared a good deal more for it than for a lilium. As I was more than forty years old before I saw one, there should have been a lack of enthusiasm in getting it; but the exuberance of youth came over me at the moment, and I never coddled anything into health with more care than I did that waxen flower and its broad, frank setting, after I had lodged it in a shady corner of my city yard. Was it the name that made me like it? Trillium! There is music in it; there is a sense of wildness; it ripples on the tongue; it has cadence, and somehow it suggests the woods. As in all spring flowers, there is refinement in it, a delicacy and modesty; but, unlike most of the blossoms of its season, it has dignity and substance. Its petals are large for the time. ​If it belongs to the rank of floral infants, it is at least one of those big, healthy, composed infants that are born at an advanced age and are advising their elders at five. What is of moment, it blooms and flourishes in the wild comer of our yard.

Rather opposed to the trillium, with its choiceness and aristocracy, is the mustard. This cheap and frequent plebeian riots in the mean places of the town—the empty lots, the littered street sides. Just as the summer had opened I found a black mustard (why black? for the Brassica nigra has n't a bit of black about it) that had sported, as the florists say, producing white instead of yellow blossoms. Undeterred by recent failures with wild clover, some ferns, and some violets, I transplanted the weed to the yard. Sharp differences of soil no doubt kill these things, where breaking of the roots may not, and when the mustard collapsed I supposed it was done for; but in a week or two it put out buds, though it did not straighten from its wilted attitude for a month, and after a little it flowered copiously. It is surprising what a number ​of things get in your way when you look for them. Since finding the white sports on mustard I have looked for others and discovered them by dozens. This sporting is not uncommon, though there is always a tendency to revert to the original type after gardeners have succeeded in turning the freak into a seeming permanence. Our chrysanthemums were never truly fine but once, and that was when they came from the conservatory. Since then they have been made small and unreliable.

A red petunia paled on my hands, and on some of the other petunias there were freaks of doubling. One whole plant of this species threatened for a time to sport into the double variety, for its stamens thickened into petals, white and plainly visible in the purple throat of nearly every flower. The dianthus was unaccountable. It sent up an extraordinary variety of bloom—single, double, red, pink, white, nearly black, in all patterns and shades. Our nasturtiums, too, raised from the seed of last summer’s plants, show new colors since last year. Our early chrysan​themums—feverfew, or “featherfew” as a florist calls them—are full of sports, singles and doubles, yellows and whites, growing on the same bush.

If we are surprised by atavism in the human species, there is at least as much reason to be puzzled by the pranks of heredity in plants. Here is a pansy below our window that bears blossoms of a royal purple throated with gold. Explain, if you can, why it yields one morning a blossom of white edged with sky-blue. Has some ancestral cross in fertilization, or some parent type, asserted itself again? The azalea often—indeed, usually—sports into foreign colors, the red issuing a dozen white blossoms, and vice versa. A double petunia that I got, with a noble, rose-like flower of crimson velvet, turned its blooms into magenta banded with white after getting into our ground, and finally settled into that form, One of our irises, which we soak at the roots in spring to make them remember their marshy habitat, petaling in mauve and white, carried a stalk of deep purple ​blossoms. Again, how is it accounted for?

Equally curious with the sports are the exhibitions of plant intelligence. Climbing vines generally exercise a good caution as to the way they will support themselves. They act almost as shrewdly as animals. But now and then they are fooled. A sweet-pea in our yard caught a loose end of string that was fluttering from the fence; but finding, after one of its tendrils had taken about five turns at the very end that it had no stability, it lengthened and strengthened the tendril into a kind of stem that held this string at arm’s length, so it might delude no other branch. And the satisfaction that a plant seems to feel when it gets where it wants to be must extend itself to the beholder. A lantana that I bought of a huckster as a commonplace bit of greenery spread into a bush five feet wide and full of bloom in a piece of dry, poor, sun-heated soil. And I can’t help thinking that men would be a good deal like our lantana, only they hate to leave their greenhouse,—the city,—and ​stand the sun and wind, even with a promise of flowering into genius. The mass of us dread change. We don’t want our roots disturbed. Even with our communistic tendency, we are so fond of ourselves, even the worst of us, that we would think twice about swapping places with other people. As to exchanging personalities—never! We might want their advantages, but would prefer to have them without the penalty of assuming their bodies and minds. But what a confession of helplessness this communism is! One Thoreau is worth twenty of us, for he dared to live his own life. Specializing of industries has made us dependent on each other, and society is become an exchange. But why should I give fifty per cent, of my effort for fifty per cent. of some other man's? Why not keep my hundred per cent., especially as I keep my personality with it?

Let ’s see: where was I? Oh, yes; my lantana. Ill-smelling, rather, and thorny, but showy, clean, and reliable. With the waning of the season it began to be im​portant, and arose to a certain arboreal dignity. Its clusters of yellow and orange blossoms always drew the eye from the window—the back one, of course; for there ’s a big difference between the front and the back view, even when the yard is in its winter burial of manure and snow. The front view bespeaks artifice, restraint, and the maker of them—man, The back view is just a peep at the page of nature, We cannot cut the leaves, or get the covers wide apart in the yard, but we can read a comforting sentence or two. We can’t raise anything in our strip of front yard: Mrs. Mulcahey’s goats from the next street don’t allow it.

Every year’s experience with plants confirms one in respect for their courage, resolution, and vitality. They ask only half a show, unless they are pampered children of the tropics. I put out our sick araucaria to die, for it had been hurt by the carelessness of a servant and was dropping its branches. I was assured that there was no help for it. Pulling it out of its pot, I thrust it negligently into the nearly worth​less soil at the back of the yard. It began to brace up. Then I put it into better earth, where it was shaded in the afternoon, and it grew and became a respectable tree, barring its lost branches.

The golden-rod, too, is a determined plant. When a stalk of it finds that it cannot reach straight up to the sunshine, it lies down and works along sidewise until it is clear of obstruction, when it turns an angle and stands up. It does other queer things. I took off half of a tall stem, this amputation affected the half that was left only in that it doubled its foliage, putting out fresh leaves in the axils of the old. Many plants make up for docking or interference by a continuous or extra output of leaves or flowers. Our hollyhock was kept in bloom unusually long by picking off the flowers as they went to seed. The spike that bore the blossoms kept growing longer as the lower flowers were cut away, until it was perhaps seven and a half feet high, and it kept blooming until frost. A dahlia stripped to the stalks by caterpillars recouped after a little, and at the end of the season had a finer, glossier coat of ​green than our neighbors’ dahlias. A horse-chestnut in our town whose leaves had been destroyed by the tussock-moth began life over in October, and put out not only fresh leaves, but blossoms.

Picking off a double white petunia that had faded, I was surprised to see, through a rent in its petals, what seemed like a flower. Pulling off the corolla, this seeming was found to be true. A folded blossom, as large as two peas, lay within the petals and stamens; and one of the petals of this infolded flower was the pistil of the outer one. Nor was this instance unique, for I found a flower within a flower on the same plant afterward. Equally odd was a performance of the bellis as it was going out of bloom in late July. One of its blossoms put forth two minor ones, not from the stalk, but from the disk, or base of the disk, itself. A sepal, in that case, became a stalk. Another sepal had enlarged and had developed imperfect leaves. One of the calendulas repeated this trick of the bellis, no less than three flower-buds growing from the edge of one of its flowers.

Plants may have wens and warts, too, ​besides those galls and swellings made by stings of insects. Our smallest flowered petunia put outa runner near ground; and as it had been planted near the stone walk, the runner rambled out upon the flagging. Where the weight of it came upon the stone, a callous tumor, or corn, was formed, as large as the end joint of a man's thumb, and studded with dwarfed or aborted leaves so thick that they were like moss. Working among the sweet alyssum once, I turned back a mass of long stalks, which flower incessantly until the cold, to let in the light on a patch of seeded earth; and after thus turning it several of the stems were found to be thickened and enlarged where they had rested on the ground.

A white weed which we call the daisy, the bellis being the English daisy, has likewise demeaned itself queerly. Itis a plant rescued from a dusty, vacant lot and made to increase and improve. Turning back a mat of its new growth, a sturdy shoot was disclosed beneath it; and this shoot, almost a branch, terminated in a star of over thirty young leaves, most of them on stalks a ​couple of inches long. In the heart of this rosette was a stemless flower-bud.

Where do all these things come from that pop out of the earth while your back is turned, and that, too, after you have browsed through the yard for weeks, pulling up with trowel and fingers every suspicious thing? In one of the beds thus attended I found a self-heal, or prunella; and, being there, I let it flower, and eke encouraged it. Though a country-loving plant, it thrives in town on neglected streets and among the cast-off bed-springs and dry-goods of vacant lots. It is a frugal flower, for it does not lavish its blossoms in a day, but puts out alternate flowers in alternate rows. The blooms are like dragon-heads, but of a more intense purple before opening than afterward.

Dead leaves have many pranks. You find them caught and impaled on trees they never grew upon; and finding them thus misplaced, and carelessly assuming that they belong and were green there, you make a note of the apple-tree with chestnut leaves and the elm that grows like an oak. ​One amazing patch of ground, not far from our house, is grown over with cat-brier; and after a gale all the waste paper in the county seems to have blown there and caught in the thorns of it, so that from a distance the waving and fluttering are as of an army with banners. On a windy day in early spring I found a dead leaf spinning like a windmill, Ordinarily a leaf will turn a few times, then turn back: but this whirligig kept on endlessly in the same direction; I looked at it closely. It was an elm leaf blown from a distant tree and caught by the stem in a cat-brier tendril. It had freedom of rotation, but a swell in the stem prevented it from falling out, while a curve in the leaf gave the wind a purchase on it.

But these antics and occasionals are of moment only as they enforce notice to the steadiness, order, and beauty that are everywhere—qualities that escape us because we take them for granted. For the best is the cheapest, and the very best costs nothing. Air, water, room to move, friendship, love, these have no money value. ​The beauty of nature, that is constantly offered and frequently spurned, is always there for the looking and smelling and hearing. But we prize best what is bought with some cost of human muscle, blood, sin, virtue, or cash—especially cash. If dandelions were made in Birmingham at £1 10s. 6d. a gross, many ships would be laden with them every spring. If they were tin ones made to look like real, they would have a good sale, anyway. In funerals it will be noticed that the importance of the man in the coffin is usually in inverse ratio to the number of the carriages that follow him. In life it is noise and difficulty that advertise some men. Flowers would be more admired if they barked.

It is not the exception that is wonderful: it is the steadfast. Yet perpetuation and duplication, which to us are order, are perhaps a proof that nature proceeds along the lines of least resistance. It is easier to imitate than to invent. The flowers, the crystals, the planets, the water-drops, are orderly in form and conduct. Look at a mullein leaf. Its velvet is a crowd of ​stars. In very soft leaves these stars have branches. The insect wandering among them should know a delight as wild as that of a man in a jungle.

Oh, yes, we agree that the insect goes to the flower to feed; but why is the flower made beautiful for him as well as savory? Has the insect an esthetic sense? If so, it means more than ours, for color to him is life. The guide-lines in the flowers are ways to the honey. And look through a magnifier and see into what palaces the fly is bidden. With your eye at the lens, you are a fly yourself. Take the tiny nettle. What a hall of pearl and amethyst! What purple frescos, what rich, dewy, nectarous translucency! We could not in a home of porcelain environ ourselves like that; but perhaps we shall try. A dining-hall of rose and yellow, for example, with no windows, but walls and roof soft shining, full of fragrance. Will man ever be kind and fine enough to fit such a place? Can he ever live as gaily as the bee?

That reminds me that I had the family ​out the other day—a raw morning in early June—to look at the grandfather of all bumblebees, who had alighted in a blossom of the pale yellow iris. He was not fertilizing it, because he was under the petal that bears that delicate brush of stamens, so we thought he was probably boring for nectar through the petal, or sucking it through some tiny aperture we could not see, as his abdomen was working strongly. On lifting the petal and even touching him with a pencil, he showed no sense of disturbance. His wings were closely folded, and the flower was heavy, cold, and wet, as everything was in that chill morning. Perhaps he was a little benumbed. At last a prod with the pencil angered him, and swinging down from the flower, he bumbled off through the yard, finally alighting on a peony.

Occasionally bees wrangle over the right to a flower, and two such I found in a regular wrestle. They were not so determined but that they could fly a little, yet with obvious lack of mutuality in purpose, falling to the ground, rolling over ​and over, and clawing the grass with their hind legs to secure a hold. They were locked in such a hug, face to face, that they endured some ducking with the hose before they broke away, and were so exhausted they could hardly fly.

Could it have been a worker that had followed a drone. into our premises to exterminate him at the time of the annual massacre?

Doubtless we are illogical to take such displeasure at humble creatures in their larval state, while we joy so greatly in their completed form; but so long as flowers and foliage are fairer than grubs, it will be so, Though I wage war on caterpillars that I find consuming our floral pets, I confess that now and then I remit the penalty in the case of some big and well-marked fellow, for the promise he has in him of being a handsome butterfly. I toss him over the fence, because our neighbors don’t care as much for flowers as we do, Odd creatures, some of these larvæ! The limacodida that I found under maples in Connecticut and oaks in Georgia is a flat, ​green object with moss-like fringe in place of feet; it moves by inflations. I put it on its back, and by these same inflations, beginning at the tail and running upward toward the head, it arched itself more and more until its balance was destroyed and it tipped over, right side up. It is a notable simulator of a leaf, and might easily be concealed by its color in vegetation.

Men, also, take on more shape and color from their diet, their work, and their surroundings than we realize. There is still some granite in the New England character, some heat in the tropical temperament. Sometimes, though, it does n’t improve one to become an adult. He is better in the larval stage of youth. Life mocks us when it reverses a promise. I used to know a juvenile phenomenon. At sixteen he played on the piano uncommonly well—with his fingers. His music lacked soul. “Never you mind,” said his father, with a wise nod; “all that Nicodemus needs to finish him is to fall in love. Then you ’ll hear expression. Then you 'll find warmth. Then you ’ll get soul.” Nicodemus fell in ​love. He played better. Nicodemus married. Nicodemus is finished. He does not play at all.

Evolution sometimes becomes involution in the human specimen, even when nothing is gained by it. With the insect there is little change, except for advantage. The safety of certain moths that look most like leaves or bark has made a tendency of their type toward this imitation. Members of the family that missed the likeness were eaten. Certain butterflies have succeeded in looking so like another and unpalatable species that the birds let them alone.

Peskiest of all our minor plagues are the plant-lice, or aphides. The poppies, though they bloom freely and gorgeously, are marvelously beset. (I want to mention our servant’s regard for these flowers—the few that she takes a little pains not to walk over when she is hanging up the clothes. “Why, they ’re just as pretty as paper flowers,” says she.) Running a poppy leaf between thumb and finger, I often slay a hundred of these aphides. ​Are they of varying species on different plants, or is it their diet of differing juices that makes them seem different? On the golden-rod they are blood-red and are lively for aphides. On house-plants I have never seen them other than green. On one camomile that stands against a fence in the sun they are pale brown or buff, nearly colorless in young specimens; and on another in rich, damp earth in a shady corner they are lead-colored or black. In the middle of June the young sheets on these plants are crusted with them. Ants were busy milking the lice on the shaded plant; but I saw none of them on the camomile that had the light. There are no closer ties between our present day of hope and original sin than these aphides and Reginald McGonigle. The aphides are a little the worse, because they are silent and sneaking in their habit, whereas Reginald commits his misdemeanors with yells and howls and snorts and stones and shocking language, and can therefore be traced. Whatever may be alleged against Reginald and his compan​ions, they do not steal along the under side of the poppies, tapping their vital juices and, one would suppose, indulging in opium drunkenness. Hardly any plant is secure against the aphis. His fat little body, moving almost as slow as a snail even after he has begotten wings,—a thing I am sure Reginald will never come to,—sprinkles itself alike over leaves and stems, and occasionally the flowers, of chrysanthemums, roses, lilies, ivy, golden-rod, and oxalis. The hairy defense of the zinnia does not trouble him, and neither heat, moisture, dryness, nor fetor makes him lose his grip. If he should let go of anything, the caterpillar and beetle and grasshopper are just behind and have good appetites. He breeds with amazing rapidity, multiplying almost before your eyes. Often he develops into a pest overnight. He is the cow of the red ant. The ant scales the stalk where this dull-witted, fat, slow-bodied creature is guzzling the sap, and pats and strokes its belly. The aphis gives up something of the sap, and the ant regales upon it. This enables the aphis to ​hold more, and he applies himself to nursing with fresh vigor. Better to be encouraged than the ant, in such a case, is the lady-bug, for she feeds on the young of aphides. All of the lady-bugs we find we carry to our yard, where we could find work for a thousand.

Do you suppose these “critters” talk? I am sure that some kind of understanding exists among them. They seem a peaceable lot, and when I have watched them through a magnifier have never found a riot going on. Their antennæ seem to be telling things to each other. That they have audible speech I doubt; for if they had they would use up more energy in it. Speech has been called incipient action; but it isn’t. It is the best preventive of action that ever was invented. It is the safety-valve through which force discharges itself—the force which, if kept back in silence, would set engines throbbing, and rend away the crusts of custom. If anarchists had the public squares for their meetings, there would be no throwing of bombs. Peaceful drinking of beer would ​be the only sequence. Don’t make silence compulsory. Never fasten down the lid of a pot filled with boiling water. You only make a man think Damn harder when you try to dam his speech or thought. Yet, oh, what inanities of action in speech! I used to be visited every day by a man who wanted to be told what the weather was likely to be next morning.

Bats are said to live on insects, and probably it is our wealth in the latter that brings so many bats flitting about the house in twilight. One of them got indoors on a July midnight and waked me with the whirring of his wings. As all our windows had screens in them, he must have come down the chimney and entered an upper room through the fireplace. He flew about at such a pace that I could not at first tell what he was, and might have thought him to be a swallow if we had such birds. He made no cry, After I had lighted the gas he circled around and around the room at the top of his speed, the eye hardly following him. No doubt he was bewildered, and wanted to get out. ​Without the least intention of doing a hurt, and meaning only to stop his flight so that I could seize and put him out of doors, I struck at him with a cloth. Either he was tender or I struck harder than I knew, for the blow killed him.

Bats or no bats, there is no let up to the life of the yard, It is gay with butterflies, moths, bee-flies, bees,—honey and bumble,—wasps, and what not. The butterflies are eager creatures, and when they alight on a new star in the crown of a zinnia they fasten to it as if they had the thirst of a week to slake. One of the busiest that I saw had a half-circle missing from his wings, the gap fitting both as he folded them together. Evidently the missing parts had been bitten out by a cat—a fifth of their substance gone. But he did not seem to mind it.

Our jimson-weed grows apace with the summer, and is eight feet high, ten feet wide, and filled with flowers. In the twilight its blossoms are visited by the night-moth, who drops in his immensely long proboscis—a good four inches, one would ​say—and pumps at their honey with many a pull and hitch as he hovers above them on æolian wing. He has eyes only for his supper, and has passed within half a foot of our hands and has sucked honey so close under our eyes that we had to move back to see him. Could any one abuse with capture a confidence like that? This busy reveler in the dark is so like a humming-bird in size, mode of flight, and way of life, that when I first saw him against the sky I was sure that he wore feathers.

There are other visitors to the same weed: trig spiders, miniature tigers who flatten themselves against the leaves and spring out on flies bigger than themselves; butterflies of the day, fair as blossoms; and two fat and loathly green grubs—tobacco-worms they are called—so like rolled leaves that they run a chance of being handled by looking like that. One of these grubs I took indoors and stabled on a stramonium leaf, covering him with a glass dish, slightly raised, to admit air. He was a tight sticker, and on every attempt to move him uttered an angry objection—​a clicking noise like the gritting of teeth. Probably it was his mandibles striking together. In the evening he had a hundred cocoons fastened to his sides and back. The larvæ of the ichneumon wasp that had been preying on his muscles, having grown from eggs deposited by that parasitic creature beneath the caterpillar’s hide, had eaten their way to the surface and spun their cases. The fellow grew thin and died in a couple of days. His mate went through the same experience—grubs, cocoons, and death.

Hardly less beautiful than the butterflies are the dragon-flies with soap-bubble colors on their wings. I found one of unusual size with a broken wing in the yard. His best color was in his eyes, which were like cabochon sapphires, very large. On attempting to fly, he would fall to the ground, or cling to a leaf and lift his tail in a half-circle as if trying to sting. I found him dead on the walk in the evening.

A colored man brought to me one of these handsome dragon-flies, or “devil’s-darning-needles” as they used to be called ​in my boyhood. He had struck it in fear, and the creature was all but dead. “Oh, they 've got a terrible stinger,” said he, as he cautiously delivered the fly into my outstretched palm. And he was surprised and half incredulous when I told him that the poor thing was not only harmless, so far as we are concerned, but that it was one of our best friends, as it preyed on the mosquito. It has been a theory of mine that a few patent facts ought to be taught in the primary schools. Here is this dragon-fly. In my childhood I was seriously told that if I allowed one to alight on me it would sew up my ears, That scared me so that it did not at once occur to me that perhaps it was n’t necessary to sit still and be sewed. In New York City a panic occurred in a public school because a dragon-fly came in at an open window. Several children were hurt in the rush for the stairs. Yet I suppose all of those boys and girls could have figured out one of those useful and instructive problems about what is the price of potatoes in Schoharie County if they are selling in Putnam County for 11⁠46/77⁠ cents ​a peck, and the price in Schoharie is ⁠4/15⁠ of 6⁠1/2⁠ per cent. higher than it is in Putnam. The farmers seemed to me to be gifted with absolute mathematical genius when I read about them in the arithmetics. Perhaps degeneration has set in among them since my school-days. Perhaps they don't hold out now for a forty-seventh of a cent on a potato trade, Perhaps—

There ’s that McGonigle boy trying to stamp down our new rose-bushes! I must pause for a moment to kill him.

No; he has escaped, and is at this moment uttering gibes from the stronghold of his own yard, I fear that Reginald was born with a desire to rule. He has chosen the wrong time and the wrong land to do it. Most people do like to rule, if it comes to that; but see how unfair it is to the other people, because they want to do the same thing. There is one thing worse, and that is to be ruled. Still, in our cities we cannot complain, for there we are seldom governed: we are merely taxed. It will make Reginald quite unhappy, when he grows up, to realize how little restraint ​we need from outside. Rhode Island had no constitution until fifty years ago, Few knew it, and nobody was the worse. England cannot prove that she has one at this day. A man who is sure of $1000 a year is above government. He can afford to watch with a careless eye the struggles of Reginald’s father to get city contracts.

i turn with pleasure from the contemplation of Reginald to the fire-flies. We enjoy their mild pyrotechnics in the evening. It is another rural pleasure that may pertain to a city lot. One evening a visitor spryly caught one in his hand—a proceeding that I disapprove. In a trice he had pinched off the creature’s abdomen and crushed the rest of him. He explained: “The scientific sharps have told us that the light dies with the animal. It does n't, as you see.” He caught a second and served it in the same way, only he slashed open the abdomen with a knife. I put both of these remnants between the lenses of a double magnifier for safe-keeping, and set them away. At midnight, four hours later, the: one that had been cut open with the knife ​had faded, though it still gave out a little light; but the sac which was whole glowed as brightly, for aught I could see, as when the animal wore it. Had I been a true observer I would have sat up with those relics and recorded the hour when the glow disappeared. But J have a living to earn for my family, and must sleep. In the morning the remnants were taken to a dark closet for inspection, but their fires were absolutely cold.

There was a tragedy on a daisy disk. One of the fire-flies, or lightning-bugs (it is not a fly, and its shine is not a bit like lightning, so why not glow-bug?}, was eating or drinking when a large yellow-brown spider pounced upon him, and so an end. The fire-fly was lying on his back, dead, in the grasp of the spider, who with his hind legs seemed to retain his hold on the flower while I shook it, keeping his fangs buried in the abdomen of his victim. I lifted the fellow to the window-sill, and without relaxing his hold for an instant he trotted off with the fly, as a dog will sometimes carry an object of nearly his own ​size, or as an ant will carry one larger than himself. The spider retired into a crevice behind the sash to finish his meal at leisure.

Other spiders, large, healthy, lithe, black, marked with bright yellow on the back, have nested in the iris. Another, a brown fellow, has made a bag of his web, running it around several leaves with its surface parallel to the ground; but the black ones spin theirs vertically between pairs of leaves, with extra-strong webbing in the center, where they stand much of the time, On an alarm these cobs will vanish; but if anything drops into their web they pounce on it like cats. I put some small caterpillars into one web. Instantly the spider was upon them. He would put his feet on the fuzzy body of the animal, as if hesitating whether to kick him out or eat him, but really I suppose he was preparing to spin; then, with remarkable facility, he would roll him around and around, so that in a few seconds the caterpillar was incased in a shroud of web, and the spider resumed his patient watch for flies. Evidently this kind of meat was rank for his taste.

​But in each case the caterpillar worked his way out of the bag and tumbled down among the roots of the iris; so perhaps the spider merely tied him up to save the web.

One caterpillar crossed from leaf to leaf on a strand of web, as deftly as if he had been an habitual rope-walker. My oldest boy fed insects to a spider, and reported a capacity on the latter’s part of fifteen flies an hour, and you could nearly see the spider swell. Yet once, when I gave a small white caterpillar to our biggest spider, she rolled her prey in web, as usual. Then I blew upon her. She may have suspected mischief from that breath, because she ran into a lower corner of her house; whereas the shaking of iris leaves by the wind had never bothered her. Soon the caterpillar freed his head and began to work his way out. The spider was after him once more, and this time remained, eating him, as it seemed, through the cover, This cob eats her own kind, too; for we found the remains of another species of spider in the web. There must have been ​a fight. Sometimes a spider will eat her own husband. That morning, too, a newcomer, a child, had taken up her residence in the same web, and was living on friendly terms with its builder. It may have been the cats, or the Monday wash, or Reginald McGonigle, but twenty-four hours later that web was gone. The elder cob had set up a new establishment four or five inches nearer to the fence, and the young one had started her abattoir in another part of the iris clump. A month later our champion spider disappeared, and a leaner one occupied her place. We had fed her liberally with insects, and perhaps she had burst. Before her heir followed this example of disappearance mayhap from the same cause, for she was a spoiled child—she had hung a papery bag—of eggs, I presume—from one of the iris stalks. We found these bags in the iris in the dead of winter.

City sounds grow dull; the perfume of the lilies, most luscious of odors, comes on a stir of air. There is a chirp of crickets’ under the balsams. A heavy bell a couple ​of miles away is striking twelve. It brings back memories of bells in New England, where the hour sounds with a slower stroke and an older tone than here. An old moon rises in the clear sky, and the yard takes on a mystery through which the mind’s eye reads the way to fairer, greener spots that some long, long day hence it may see with the eye of the body. Or must it be with the spirit eye alone?