concerning his chosen hunting-grounds, if, indeed, he does not avail himself of that happy aphorism with which Gilbert White was wont to instruct his questioners concerning the natural-history harvest of his beloved Selborne: ‘That locality is always richest which is most observed.’

“With the possession of a back-yard, then, there is still hope for the most case-hardened cit. Let the quickened sod have its freedom of expression, and the grasses and weeds a respite from the sickle. Give the cold shoulder to the gardener, or, if need be, confine his arts to the fence border, and if you would repeat my experience, let the chrysanthemum claim the chief part of his attention. Twenty-five varieties of this plant bloomed in my borders last season, and they won my admiration, not less because of their beautiful display of color, which more than once relieved itself against a background of snow, than for the sterling wisdom they had displayed in biding their time until the rival wildlings of my grass-plot had seen their day.

“Next summer my square of turf shall again contribute to my enjoyment, yea, though I seed the whole community with thistles, tares, and fleabane, and run the gauntlet of the city ordinances.”

Gibson was mindful of the exhortation, “To do good and to communicate, forget not.” He could not contain himself, when he knew so many interesting things. He was a born teacher, a communicator and medium of knowledge. His studies all had a real if unconscious aim. He could not content himself with making them simply as a contribution to the field of facts, nor to the formation of theories. He wanted them to go farther and furnish information to other men. He craved an audience. He needed pupils, or at least auditors. It was not for the sake of being heard by others, or of hearing himself, either; he wanted others to know and to enjoy the great store of wonderful and fascinating things which mother Nature keeps in store for those who love her. He was a genuine missionary of science, an apostle of art, a herald of the wonders and beauties of the world. His social nature, eager for companionships, sought associates in knowledge. He loved to share what he had received. And he took others into his confidence as soon as he had unearthed a new secret of the world around us. He had the same spirit in scientific knowledge that sends men and women to preach the gospel to the ignorant and misguided. Indeed, in one of his letters, outlining the idea of his “Sharp Eyes,” he uses the word “missionary,” which he repeats in the introduction to that volume. The whole paragraph in which it occurs shows Gibson’s feeling toward those who, “having eyes, see not:”

“Recognizing too the evident hunger for information concerning every-day objects in Nature, and that where one individual would write for enlightenment one hundred would wonder in silence and ten thousand would dwell in heedless ignorance, I realized that such a book might also go forth as a missionary to open the eyes of the blind, or at least to quicken a desire for fuller comprehension of the omnipresent marvel and beauty of the commonplace.” One can realize how to such a nature, with such a sense of responsibility to others, a letter like the following would appeal, written by a friend of his who had given much of her time and strength to thought and labor for the interest of working girls:

“It has come to me through my association with these working girls that the meagerness of their lives does not so much mean the lack of things as the lack of thoughts, and I have been planning these talks which have been running through the winter in answer to the question ‘What shall we think about?’ I have asked every one to make the talk simple and plain and I have tried to impress upon them that it is to be only a talk, not a lecture. I have also sought for simple themes, so that they need not be so far above the comprehension of the untrained minds that it would find no answering chord in their desires. If we can take the every-day things which you and I know are full of a wonderful interest, if one but know how to see them, and open their eyes to their wonders, I have believed that one would be opening doors into an undreamed-of fairy land to them. So you see why I come to you. You are one of the door-keepers into that fairy land. Will you open it for us?”

This desire to inform others kept him wholly free from anything like pedantry. He had none of the self-importance of men who try to make a little knowledge go a great way. Nor was he forgetful of the difficulties of less instructed minds. His style in picture and in speech was simple and direct. He had no passion for long words. He did not find it necessary to befog others with the technical speech of the specialists. He was the friend of children and simple country folk and the unlearned everywhere; and they will owe him a debt of gratitude that he spoke in their language and made them understand him. “I wonder,” he once said, “if the time will ever come when a man may read a botanical work without understanding Latin.” It was one of his ambitions to write such a book; he meant to make a botany in English, and illustrate it himself. Over fifteen hundred drawings, as we have seen, are in existence which he had accumulated with this work in view,—one more of the many schemes that fertile mind was projecting, never, alas! to be carried out.

Of all the great nature students of our time, Richard Jeffries ranks as the one most closely in touch with the sub-human world, the earth and all the life it bears in and on its bosom. His whole soul seems exquisitely in tune with the cosmos. He breathes with the respirations of the earth; he sighs with the breath of the winds; his senses and his thoughts sway with the bending of the grain and the waving of the tree-tops. “To know him,” says his eulogist, Mr. Ellwanger, “is to approach nearer the heart of the flower, the mystic concave of the sky, and the elusive verge of the horizon.” But in this respect he has a peer in William Hamilton Gibson. No man ever lived on friendlier terms with nature. As close, as accurate, as patient in his observation as any of the classic characters in nature love, he has a distinction all his own, a peculiar personal attitude toward all extra-human life. He feels and he expresses a sort of fellowship with life in other than human form. He accepts the lesser things as little brothers and sisters of the human. He gives the right hand of fellowship to whatever has life. He humanizes, if one may so term it, the life which lies below man’s in the vital scale. What writer since the days of the primeval fairy tales ever brought the worlds of human life and other life so near each other? He seems a modern Siegfried, into whose ears the birds talk, and the grass whispers as it grows. When he comes back from an exploration into the insect realm close to his own doorstep, he reports what he has seen and heard precisely as if he were recounting the talk and doings of his own kind. He translates this life of beetle and spider and bee and ant and bird into the terms of human life and activity. He makes all life seem related to our lives, all being to appear of one substance, all to be worthy of interest, sympathy, love, and reverence. More than any other mind of his generation he leads us to feel that kinship of all life which Drummond has asserted in “The Ascent of Life,” and which Professor Shaler has condensed into a phrase in calling it “The Bond of the Generations.” That was a shrewd and sagacious disclosure of character, as well as a bit of fun, which led his mother to write, in the letter already quoted, “How are your friends and dear companions, the worms?” He was on terms of friendship with all living things. But to any mind at all sensitive to the real and deeper meaning of nature, to its spiritual origin, its profound unity, this underlying affinity of all its forms of life, there was a bit of true philosophy in the mother’s comment. It was certainly truer and wiser than the criticism once made upon his intellectual temperament in the columns of the “Tribune.” “So thoroughly,” said this reviewer, “was he absorbed in the life of the humbler animals and plants that one suspects he was quite out of his element elsewhere. He was incapable of assigning them a relative place. To him they were always supreme. And because they were supreme they were colored and transformed by his humanizing and anthropomorphizing whimseys. He was always reading into them his own charming qualities of mind and heart, at the same time that he was imitating their own quickness and alertness. Indeed, natural life always appealed not so much to his imagination as to his fancy. He was absorbed in nature as a child is absorbed in its playthings. With all his minuteness of knowledge, he never fully and unqualifiedly faced the two great facts of the natural world, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. He exaggerated and instinctively transformed the natural world, and to the using of it as the source and stimulus of his own acute poetic ingenuity, devoted all his energies and interest.” The criticism is brilliant, but superficial; and its kindly temper does not atone for its total injustice and perversion of values. It is pure assumption, in the first place, to call the “struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest” “the two great facts of the natural world.” Who authorizes the ranking of those facts as prime or principal? Why not assign the highest place to the continuity of life, and the conservation of advantages, and the advance of types? These are quite as impressive facts as those others. And if they are suggestive of quite other inferences neither Gibson nor any nature lover need be disparaged for choosing to dwell upon those inferences. If he, like a growing company of later students and observers, was impressed with the fraternity of all lives, great and small, with the analogies between the human and the dumb creation, and felt the kinship of even insects and birds, with their later and more favored human cousins,—if we may not use a closer term,—why should this keener insight be called a “whimsey,” and this deeper divination a “fancy”? And because he had a nature which thrilled and fired with the delight of knowledge and all the mental activity which it sets in motion, why should he be accused of using his growing store of that knowledge as a wine to warm his fancy and a spur to the making of similes? The fact is, Gibson not only saw and faced the law of struggle and of survival, but he saw a great deal more. And if he did not dwell upon these facts with the lugubrious emphasis which characterized so many of his contemporaries in science, it was not because he saw them out of relation, but in truer and clearer perspective. There has been too little sympathy, too little of the “humanizing and anthropomorphizing” spirit in scientific research. Gibson was a prophet, in advance of his day. What he was doing is fast becoming the dominant spirit of investigators. And many more laws and principles will be laid bare when men come to realize that all living things are of one blood, than are to be discerned through the cold and unsympathetic gaze of old-fashioned science. Gibson’s habit, moreover, was not a “humanizing” of animal and plant life, in the sense of trying to force our life upon theirs, attributing human thoughts and aims and feelings to the lower creation. It was rather an effort to link their life to ours, by insight, sympathy, and study. He simply made men feel the kinship of all living things. In that he was fully in the spirit of the most advanced science. He believed thoroughly in the truth contained in a sentence which he quoted from “the rapt philosopher of Walden”: “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist and look at nature directly. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.”

How thoroughly he grasped the spirit of the “new botany” which traces the links between the animal and insect worlds one passage will suffice to show.

“What startling disclosures are revealed to the inward eye within the hearts of all these strange orchidaceous flowers! Blossoms whose functions, through long eras of adaptation, have gradually shaped themselves to the forms of certain chosen insect sponsors; blossoms whose chalices are literally fashioned to bees or butterflies; blossoms whose slender, prolonged nectaries invite and reward the murmuring sphinx-moth alone, the floral throat closely embracing his head while it attaches its pollen masses to the bulging eyes, or perchance to the capillary tongue! And thus in endless modifications, evidences all of the same deep vital purpose.

“Let us then content ourselves no longer with being mere ‘botanists’—historians of structural facts. The flowers are not mere comely or curious vegetable creations, with colors, odors, petals, stamens, and innumerable technical attributes. The wonted insight alike of scientist, philosopher, theologian, and dreamer is now repudiated in the new revelation. Beauty is not ‘its own excuse for being,’ nor was fragrance ever ‘wasted on the desert air.’ The seer has at last heard and interpreted the voice in the wilderness. The flower is no longer a simple passive victim in the busy bee’s sweet pillage, but rather a conscious being, with hopes, aspirations, and companionships. The insect is its counterpart. Its fragrance is but a perfumed whisper of welcome, its color is as the wooing blush and rosy lip, its portals are decked for his coming, and its sweet hospitalities humored to his tarrying; and as it finally speeds its parting affinity rests content that its life’s consummation has been fulfilled.”

How closely he observed and how much he read “between the lines” appears in his account of his introduction to the study of entomology, the first awakening of his real interest in what became the object of a consuming passion.

“It was a day in early June, and nature was bursting with exuberance. The very earth was teeming with awakening germs—here an acorn, with its biformed hungry germ—parody on the dual mission of mortal life—one seeking earth, the other heaven; here

an odd little elf of maple, with his winged cap still clinging as he danced upon his slender stem; while numerous nameless green things clove the sod and matted leaves, and slender coils of ferns unrolled in eager grasp from their woolly winter nest.

“But dear to my heart as were these familiar tokens, how quickly were they all forgotten in my contemplation simply of a little stone that lay upon a patch of mold directly at my elbow, and my wandering eyes were riveted upon it, for it seemed as though in the universal quickening even this also had taken life.

“I can see it this moment. It moves again, and yet again, until now, with a final effort, it is lifted from its setting and rolled away, while in its place there protrudes from the ground a chrysalis risen from its sepulcher. Filled with wonder, I sit and watch as though in a dream, awaiting the revelation from this mysterious earthly messenger, when suddenly the encasement swells and breaks, the cerements are burst, and the strange shape gives birth to the form of a beautiful moth—a tender, trembling thing, which emerges from the empty shell and creeps quivering upon an overhanging spray.

“Now followed that beautiful and wonderous unfolding of the winged life—the softly-falling crumpled folds, the quivering pulsations of the new-born wings eager for their flight, until at length their glory shone in purity and perfection—a trial flutter, and the perfect being took wing and flew away!

“Thus did I become a votary to that science known as ‘entomology.’ What wonder, then, that it should yield to me in after life a winged significance, a spirit of unrest that bursts the shell of mere terminology, and enjoys a realm of resource not found in books, except, indeed, between the lines? For the entomology which I would seek is not yet written, and it is beyond my conception that any one among its votaries could witness unmoved by its deeper impress a spectacle such as this, or could find through the retina of science alone an ample insight.”

It is a curious feature of his experience that even the birds and the beasts seemed to feel this sympathy of his, and permitted him to take such liberties with them as they seldom grant. So many stories of his power and its exercise have gone out, that it seems best to let him give his own version of it. The first instances are narrated in a letter written from the Thorn Mountain House, Jackson, New Hampshire, in September, 1883:

“Among other things that Mrs. Farr has confided to a few of her newly made friends at the Intervale, is my remarkable power over animals and birds, by which I take them in my hand alive in the woods, and tame them. But while this idea of hers originally started in a joke, I am gradually becoming convinced that I have the power she attributes to me, but fail to develop or utilize it. On the very day she first spread the rumor, I walked with herself and husband in Cathedral Woods. He espied a squirrel jumping along the pine needles with a cone in his mouth. I suddenly conceived the notion to capture him. I followed him for a few paces and finally succeeded in placing my hand over him and catching him, holding him in my hand for several minutes afterward, as my fingers still bear witness from the network of scratches they exhibit. On the following day I almost caught a chick-a-dee, and to cap the climax, of all things, to-day, after dinner, while sitting on the porch I observed what I supposed to be a day-sphinx hovering over a bed of flowers across the lawn. I approached and soon discovered it to be a humming-bird, and was about to turn back when the thought suggested itself to try and catch the little fellow. Accordingly I approached and watched him closely for a moment or two, drawing nearer and nearer the while. He soon seemed to get accustomed to my presence and came to sip the honey from some verbenas at my feet. I lowered my hand slowly, and closed it about his tiny body with perfect ease and he seemed to make no effort to release himself. I took him to my room and closing the windows gave him wing. I played with him for nearly an hour and he at length became so tame that he would alight upon my finger and jump from one finger to another placed in front of him, and even preen his feathers. He was a dear little creature and I almost wanted to keep him. He would alight upon the window shutter, and when I held my finger an inch or so in front of him he would jump on it and fluff out his feathers. I could pick him up at any moment and lay him on his back in my hand, where he would remain perfectly quiet, with his bright black eyes moving all about as alive as could be. At length I concluded to give him his freedom, but in order first to allow the guests of the house an opportunity to see my diminutive captive, I tied a long piece of cotton twine loosely in one knot about one of his tiny feet and thus exhibited him. The twine was so heavy that it eased his occasional flight and the softness of it prevented injury to his foot. When all had seen him I cut the string close to his leg and away he went like the wind, no doubt taking his first opportunity to pick off the loose fold of string still dangling to his leg. Once before I almost picked a humming-bird from a flower, and I believe I can do it again and again with a few trials. So I feel less than ever like disabusing the mind of Mrs. Farr of what at first seemed so incredible and improbable.”

In the chapter on “Woodnotes” in “Happy Hunting Grounds” Gibson describes the incident which was mentioned by Dr. Raymond at his funeral. He was once standing in line with many others at the polls in a voting-place in Brooklyn, when a dove flew down and into the room, and came straight to him, alighting upon his shoulder. No one in the place knew anything about the bird, or had ever seen it before. No one could see why it should have chosen him over all others in the group of voters. Possibly Mr. Gibson’s own explanation will have to answer. In his note of the incident he says, “I remarked to the bystanders, ‘That bird knows a good Republican when he sees one.’”

Others also recall the incident of Dr. Abbott’s visit to Washington, when Mr. Gibson pointed out a bird in a near-by tree and began to describe its peculiar markings. Soon he rose impulsively, went up to the tree, reached out for the bird, and took the little creature in his hand, without its appearing in the least alarmed or hurt. Then, when he had finished his description and thus illustrated it from life, he replaced his specimen in the tree, whence it flew away. He certainly seemed to have that about him which made even the birds feel that he loved them and meant them no harm.

His crowning work as a naturalist was done in the lectures upon the cross-fertilization of plants which fascinated so many audiences with the novel story of one of nature’s most amazing manifestations of adaptation and of resource. For years he had been a careful student of Sprengel, Darwin, and Müller, whose experiments and studies he supplemented with careful observations of his own, upon the relations of plant-and insect-life. He accumulated a mass of studies and of notes. He brooded over this theme for years. And at last, driven to utterance, he prepared himself, as few men are able to, for a series of lectures, illustrated with charts of his own invention and his own making. The machinery of these lectures was a superb test of his triple powers as naturalist, as artist, as writer. They were based on a solid and accurate knowledge of natural history. They were illustrated by a master hand in mechanical technique, reinforced by an artist’s skill in drawing and in color. They were set forth in a text which was clear, vivacious, and forceful. They constituted one of the most delightful and popular courses ever given before the American public. His own account of the origin of these lectures is most interesting. He had been in the habit of giving informal talks and lectures upon natural history in his summer home at Washington, illustrating them by rapid sketches on the blackboard. “When I came,” he said, “to touch upon the topic of inter-association and inter-communion of insects and flowers, especially the mechanism of flowers, their movements and forms, I found that I was handicapped, as many other scientists had been, by the difficulty of expressing motion by fixed drawings and descriptions. It occurred to me to make a drawing of the sage-blossom with its tilted stamen fastened on separately to show the movement. This I did. It proved to be a revelation to myself and I made several other sectional charts of flowers and of insects that same summer. They served to demonstrate ocularly and simply, without the slightest effort on the part of my audience, what had heretofore been presented only in difficult technical descriptions. There really seemed to be a new field for work, and I accepted the indications and concentrated my thought upon the theme.” A writer who had been an attendant at these lectures gives this description of them:

“The lecture describes some general principles about a group of flowers and their associated insect-visitors, and while the listener is endeavoring to induce his imagination to form some picture of the process, Mr. Gibson steps to a screen, hangs up and unfolds a beautifully executed sketch of the flower, and gives an ocular demonstration of the thing he has just described. One sees the bee crawl into the sage-blossom, tilt the pivoted stamens, and come out with the pollen upon his back, which burden he is now ready to carry to another blossom, upon whose pistil he partly unloads it. The same busy bee creeps into the pogonia and straightway two powdery anthers are clasped to his side, leaving their visible deposit of yellow dust. The orchids are made to clap sticking-plasters upon their visitors, or to hurl bombshells of pollen on their heads. There is no room for failure to understand. The whole process is demonstrated before the sight, by a mechanism which works to a charm, a visible and artistic unfolding of the most subtle operations of the plant and insect world.”

An instant and complete success awaited this new venture. Everywhere there was a demand for the lectures, and they were received with a popular interest rather surprising when one considers how thoroughly scientific they were. The farmers of his own neighborhood; the members of sedate city clubs; school-children and society-women,—all classes and types of people with any appetite for knowledge, or any sense of the wonderful in nature, joined in the applause which greeted Gibson’s appearance as a lecturer upon natural history. He repeated upon the platform the success he had won as a writer and an artist. He established his reputation as a master in scientific demonstration. It was truly said of him that the field he entered in these lectures “had not since the days of Agassiz been cultivated with such success as by Mr. Gibson.” As a popular teacher of scientific fact no man in this country since Agassiz gained such a hold or did such a work as he. There is no doubt that if he had lived he would have won an international renown in this field as well as that of art.

CHAPTER VI

THE ACCIDENT OF AUTHORSHIP

“The way in which I drifted into literary work was quite natural, and in a way this work became imperative if I was to gain a livelihood. I had my sketch-book and portfolio full of drawings from nature. As a beginner I could not illustrate, I could only show these specimens, which would not sell alone by themselves. But there were certain things in natural history which my sketches did illustrate. This fact suggested to me the possibility of writing up matter to go with my sketches. In this way I found entrance into the illustrated publications, and eventually secured a good hold for myself. But I had never yet had the remotest idea of becoming a writer. The way in which I happened to take up more serious writing was through a suggestion of Mr. Henry M. Alden, the editor of Harper’s Magazine. I returned one summer from a vacation spent in Washington, Connecticut, and was describing to him my school-life, telling him little episodes which had been recalled by my visit to Mr. Gunn. Mr. Alden seemed interested, and when I was done, said to me, ‘I want you to write that out for the magazine.’ This suggestion led to an article called ‘Snug Hamlet,’ which to my surprise and gratification was received when it appeared, with a good deal of favor. Then Mr. Alden suggested that I prepare an article to go with it, which, as this had to do with summer, should treat of winter. This, too, was written, ‘The Winter Idyl.’ Then followed others upon spring and autumn. With these four sketches I had enough for a book; and ‘Pastoral Days’ was the result, which proved a great success.”

Such was his introduction to literature. He always regarded it as a pendant to his other work, something to introduce his sketches, to help along his art. He never became confused by his various aptitudes, nor lost sight of his great passion and purpose. He kept the essential spirit of his life and work quite clear of any entanglement with what was accidental. He had never expected, never intended to be a writer; and his success at literary work was a surprise to him, as it was to his friends. They apparently had never thought of him as a possible author, and scarcely knew how to take his achievement.

When the press-notices of “Pastoral Days” began to come in, they were almost unanimous in according to the newly fledged author unstinted praise for the literary portion of his work. The chorus of appreciation is almost unbroken; and one feels, through all the perfunctory graciousness of the reviewers, so hard-pressed at Christmas-tide, a note of sincerity and real pleasure in the new writer’s production. When one considers that Gibson the writer was an unknown aspirant for favor, and that he was competing with Gibson the artist, the reigning favorite among American illustrators, the success of his literary venture is really amazing. Repeatedly the book is called “a prose-poem.” “Although there be no poetry in it, the book in its totality is a most exquisite poem.” “There is a smooth and tender rhythmic flow in the phrasing, an affluence of diction which constitute one of the indispensable elements of poetry, and almost entitle the sketches to be named among the poems of the language.” One of the most competent critics, in a journal of the first rank, wrote of his prose:

“William Blake is the most noted poet-artist of this century, but not in his work is to be found such unity and harmony between what he does as pictorial and literary artist, as exists in ‘Pastoral Days.’ We have used the words poet-artist advisedly in connection with Mr. Gibson. He is above all a poet-artist. Not a poet alone, nor an artist alone, but the two together, a combination as rare as it is charming.”

Even the “Evening Post” calls them “Mr. Gibson’s four sympathetic, appreciative, poetically interpretative essays upon the seasons.” And it puts the question to its readers, “Need we say that this author-artist is a poet although he writes in prose, or that his text and his pictures are essentially a poem of the New England year?” But two of his reviewers—one in the “Utica Morning Herald,” and another in the “Boston Literary World”—actually cite the same passage in his prose which “reads with the movement and rhythm of blank verse.” The latter of these says:

“Mr. Gibson writes with a curious study of rhythmic effect; his whole book, in fact, might easily have been converted into blank verse,—as witness this extract from pp. 127-8, which, to help the illusion, we print in that form:

“All this, understand, and the rest of a hundred and fifty and more pages like it, is sober prose; but it makes one think of eighteenth-century poetry like Graham’s, which is very good descriptive poetry by the way.”

Says one enthusiastic critic, speaking first of the make-up of the volume:

“It is almost too beautiful to read; but with a determination to see what lay beyond this vision of the beautiful, we commenced to read, and found the author to be a high-priest of nature. We were led along by the charming simplicity of the writer, till at last, in midsummer we seemed to be surrounded by scenes so familiar that we almost suspected that by some strange mishap the author had misspelled the name of the school of early days, and had written ‘Snuggery’ for ‘Gunnery.’ How is this?...

“The letter-press of such books is usually a make-weight for the illustrations; but in this case it is hard to decide which of the two merits the palm.”

Another speaks of the text of the book, saying:

“Here quite as strikingly as in the designs for illustration is shown that loving familiarity with all the infinite variations in nature’s moods and works. Without the pictures altogether, these sketches would compel admiration as very notable specimens of word-painting.”

It will be news to many of his admirers to know that Gibson’s first book was published in 1876. It was entitled, “The Complete American Trapper,” and was published by James Miller, of New York. The book was republished in 1878 by Bradley & Co., and again in 1880 by Harper Brothers under the title, “Camp-Life in the Woods; and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making.” It was written out of the joyous and ample memories of his youth, supplemented by his reading and intercourse with hunters and woodsmen. He refers in the preface to his own boyish days, and to “one autumn in particular which shines out above all the rest; and that was when his traps were first set, and were the chief source of his amusement. The adventurous excitement which sped him on in those daily tramps through the woods, and the

buoyant, exhilarating effect of the exercise, can be realized only by those who have had the same experience.” This little book, which still appeals to the juvenile mind,—a new edition was put out as lately as 1899,—has had a singular charm, not only for boys, but for those grown men who never quite lose the heart of boyhood. Gibson himself brought it to the notice of Charles A. Dana, of the “New York Sun,” and handed him a copy to read. The result of that chance courtesy was not a perfunctory review by a subordinate of the staff. The “chief” himself read it and wrote an enthusiastic notice of over two columns’ length. The young author—he was only twenty-six—went to Mr. Beecher for a notice, at the time he first changed publishers. He wrote this account of the call to his mother:

“On the morning after receiving the above I found a letter from Bradley & Co., in which they remarked that they hoped I would succeed in getting a word from Mr. Beecher. I sent the notice to them and would like you to see the letter I got from them in acknowledgment.”

Dr. J. G. Holland was another friend to whom he looked for a word of approval. He was not quite so sure of his own mind, and wrote in a much more guarded way. His humane heart was a little troubled about the effect of the book. In truth, Gibson himself became, in later years, quite uneasy about it. His own sympathy with animals increased, and his love for them, as little brothers and sisters of the wood; and he grew more and more averse to whatever gave them pain. But he rested in the intent of his book as he describes it explicitly in the preface: “If the poor victims are to serve no use after their capture, either as food, or in the furnishing of their plumage or skins for useful purposes, the sport becomes heartless cruelty, and we do not wish to be understood as encouraging it under any circumstances.” He would probably have strengthened that utterance at a later day, and possibly have written another preface. Dr. Holland’s letter runs thus:

It should not be supposed that Gibson was so confident of himself and his own resources that he disdained the work and experience and knowledge of others. He was a good reader and a hard student. The pages of his books are crowded with passages out of his favorite poets, and his note-books show the careful husbanding of the fruits of his reading on all the themes nearest to his heart. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Browning, in all that they have seen and sung of nature, were his authorities often cited, and annotated, and winnowed into his note-books. The New England poets he knew and loved, and shared all their honest preference for those home products which so many count homely and call commonplace because they happen to be common. Thoreau he knew thoroughly and loved as a master in the great profession of nature-study; and his references to him are always those of a modest disciple, his bearing and attitude that of deference and respect. Hawthorne, too, was one whose subtle and spiritual genius found a sympathetic and ready interpreter in his own imagination. Darwin he knew, and all his works which bore upon cross-fertilization had mastered. When he gave the wonderful talks on flowers and their insect allies to the townspeople and farmers of Washington, an old “native” came to him, and in the dialect of old New England said: “Mr. Gibson, do you mean to tell me thet thet’s whut Darwin’s been tellin’ ’baout?” “Yes,” was the reply, “that is one of the things he has been talking about.” “Wal,” was the rejoinder, “I never took no stock in Darwin afore, but I sh’ll think a heap on him naow.” Indeed, there was, in all his lectures, the frankest acknowledgment of his indebtedness—of the common debt of all of us—to those pioneers in this fallow field of knowledge. He stinted no praise, no honor to their names, and used their work with hearty acknowledgment. He knew Sprengel, Darwin, Müller, well and, following their lead into the enchanted and enchanting country of new knowledge, soon made himself a student at first hand of the things he had been taught by these great masters.

Gibson was by no means an “easy” writer. His page, as it stands, revised and corrected, hardly gives a sign of the pains taken to bring it into smooth and fluent shape. It seems to be a natural, spontaneous running-on of a mind as sure of its expressions as it is of its impressions. But the effect was purchased only by the hardest and most conscientious labor. His “first drafts” show all the experiments he made in words, phrases, expressions, and construction. Many times the text is hardly legible, it is so crossed, recrossed, cut, interlined, and rewritten altogether. If Sheridan’s judgment is to be accepted, that “easy writing’s curst hard reading,” Gibson comes honestly by his pleasing style. The patient work of the author has smoothed the way for the reader. He had both the qualifications which Pope declares constitute the secret of good writing,—“to know thoroughly what one writes about, and not to be affected.” And to these he added a third; he took pains.

In a letter written to Mr. Gunn in 1880, Gibson pours out his heart, as he always did to his old teacher, and reveals incidentally the spirit in which he took his literary work, as well as the honest and conscientious purpose behind it all.

There is an interesting letter, much prized by Gibson, in which his old friend gave him such unstinted praise as seldom comes from so exacting a critic in the field in which the young man was at work. Mr. Gunn wrote him: