CHAPTER III

TO THE TEACHER

There is a three-pronged point to this chapter: (1) the empty birds’ nests are not things to mourn over. The birds are safe and warm down south; and they will build fresh, clean nests when they get back. Teach your children to see things as they are--the wholesomeness, naturalness, wisdom, and poetry of Nature’s arrangement. The poets are often sentimental; and most sentimentality is entirely misplaced. (2) The nest abandoned by the bird may be taken up by the mouse. The deadest, commonest of things may prove full of life and interest upon close observation. Summer may go; but winter comes and brings its own interests and rewards. So does youth go and old age come. There is nothing really abandoned in nature--nothing utterly lacking interest. (3) A mouse is not a Bengal tiger; but he is a whole mouse and in the _completeness_ of his life just as large and interesting as the tiger. If the small, the common, the things right at hand, are not interesting, it is not their fault--not the mouse’s fault--but _ours_.

FOR THE PUPIL

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_white-foot_: the deer, or wood mouse (_Peromyscus leucopus_).

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“_There are no birds in last year’s nest_”: a line from a poem by Longfellow called “It is not always May.”

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_Darwin’s book on earthworms:_ Read in this book how the worms make garden soil.