One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie—joy-riders with a luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.

We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.

Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so forest-clad—the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing interests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouse of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.

The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents, nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through gives the automobilist pause.

As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb, khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim, processions—how impressive they were!

Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them—much that suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake bottoms.

We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power, and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the silver age will displace the iron age.

The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassy the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.

Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of Pittsburgh, an ideal place—a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence well carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But the night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the "long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.

The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand information, which he did to our great comfort.

Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we slept indoors.

On the following day one of the big cars had an accident—the fan broke, and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves, he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled car was again in running order.

On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring, eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders. But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants. Pure elements—air, water, earth—these settle the question; Camp Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting—a bird rarely seen north of the Potomac.

An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the wheel and had our pictures taken.

At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers—a very firm, level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and ever so many miles."

The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed—stately, hardy growths, and very pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the eupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.

August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were working south and east.

We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club, on the banks of the river—an ideal spot. The people at the big clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat River deserves a better name.

The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped, while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad, open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with bees.

Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape, I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these mountains during the great Ice Age.

We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d—a famous spring, and a beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek, not far from the Narrows—a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad, limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.

We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.

I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent—or with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places, but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many sections.

One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm. One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in bringing wood and doing other errands.

A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old. When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting years, one is lost when cut off from them.

Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark, especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain, near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly an equivocal smile—the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in Michigan.

Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background. Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a master discuss his own art.

A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way, driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback, on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.

The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature. One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature, indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.

No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain districts of the South—good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.

It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms—dust, rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents—is pretty sure to come to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all, is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization, and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more.

Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is more adaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest in the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down its banks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He never ceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that if the streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm labor everywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon the benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if the water-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set to work in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers and others in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively little attention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the great mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractor engine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget the housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every household that will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk.

Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford would inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr. Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some of the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk half-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, and his optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. His good-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practical turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of business methods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business man—that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his great enterprise—a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are so often used to enslave or destroy.

In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison: his first and leading thought has been, "What can I do to make life easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life, though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature—a practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight. And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings. A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards, as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open and for wild nature.

Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type—the clean, clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative, devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas—a manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.

It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.

The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West, differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of a world made up of three elements—sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down. They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the granite of our coast.

As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.

The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous and tough.

I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.

To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves—not so highly colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black ph[oe]be flits about your porch and arbor vines.

Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are next in number.

Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a teetering motion of the hind part of the body.

While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain such as Alaska alone can afford.

But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air—all arrest your attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings. They fly around the world.

The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in its behavior?

However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass, but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their food-supplies.

On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look upon—airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which discharge on the beach.

There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves, shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water—coasting, at it were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking creature as before.

A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors—a bird that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing—is the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.

I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions. In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of the shore.

The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to the place.

The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed, found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how, fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the straight side of it, and behold—the entrance to the spider's castle! I was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic—a long silken chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.

Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find them unaided.

We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself (as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther down in her burrow.

Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the night.

As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects, such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense. They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.

All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and working it up into a finer product.

The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is then discarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the old door lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silk and clay, and is a substantial affair.

The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingenious devices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, they delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They have probably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions of years before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so fine that science makes the astonishing statement that it would take four millions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of our head—a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain.

Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals, and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things.

The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. It is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast—the soil for cañons and the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is a tough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble or disintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick are easily made from it.

This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. It belongs to the family of Mygalidae. It resembles in appearance the tarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the same habits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic piece of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.

Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance—no visible drills for such rough work—one wonders how she excavates a burrow six inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the cheliceræ. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest. Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.

One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice, each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."

On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size, but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfully concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.

Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun, Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.

In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering, it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck has forgotten to point out, is this:

In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him. Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud, but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate, but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In the vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the female is the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely upon her. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are, as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which they carry brings this about.

There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in the insect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground, always in the larval state.

In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the willows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous and conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high above the silken tresses which mother the future ear.

One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood of young ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or more, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in the house under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day or night the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which he had used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. Madam Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the end of a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidently devoured all her little ones.

I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and in neither case did the occupant ever leave its nest.

Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when they are about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to that time, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were very small, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size and appearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could get no clue.

One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and saw him try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previous he had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting a straw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense they seized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to the surface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider would keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape of a hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and clean and untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were as black as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in her parlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain than was she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost. We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again; but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. In the novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her wits deserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger and thrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quickly into it and disappeared.

Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I never saw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, except those which we had disturbed in our observations.