BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1895

V. ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS

VI. IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS

113

131

The frontispiece was etched by Charles H. Woodbury, and
the vignette by W. H. W. Bicknell, after a photograph of Mr.
Burroughs taken at the age of fifty-three.

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FRESH FIELDS

I

NATURE IN ENGLAND

I

THE first whiff we got of transatlantic nature was the peaty breath of the peasant chimneys of Ireland while we were yet many miles at sea. What a homelike, fireside smell it was! it seemed to make something long forgotten stir within one. One recognizes it as a characteristic Old World odor, it savors so of the soil and of a ripe and mellow antiquity. I know no other fuel that yields so agreeable a perfume as peat. Unless the Irishman in one has dwindled to a very small fraction, he will be pretty sure to dilate his nostrils and feel some dim awakening of memory on catching the scent of this ancestral fuel. The fat, unctuous peat, the pith and marrow of ages of vegetable growth, how typical it is of much that lies there before us in the elder world; of the slow ripenings and accumulations, of extinct life and forms, decayed civilizations, of ten thousand growths and achieve