has been my aim in the thirty-nine chapters
of the three books in this series to carry my
readers through the weeks of all the school
year, not however as with a calendar, for that would be
more or less wooden and artificial; but by readings,
rather, that catch in a large way the spirit of the
particular season, that give something definite and
specific in the way of suggestions for tramps afield
with things to look for and hear and do. Naturally many
of the birds and animals and flowers mentioned, as well
as woods and aspects of sky and field, are those of my
own local environment—of my New England
surrounding—and
so must differ in some details from those
surrounding you in your far Southern home or you on
your distant Pacific coast, or you in your rich and
varied valley of the Mississippi, or you on your wide
and generous prairie. But the similarities and
correspondences, the things and conditions we have in
common, are more than our differences. Our sun, moon,
sky, earth—our land—are the same, our
love for this
beautiful world is the same, as is that touch of nature
which we all feel and which makes us all kin. Wherever,
then, in these books of the seasons, the things treated
differ from
the things around you, read about those things for
information, and in your journeys afield fill in the
gaps with whatever it is that completes your landscape,
or rounds out your cycle of the seasons, or links up
your endless chain of life.
While I have tried to be accurate throughout these
books, still it has not been my object chiefly to write
a natural history—volumes of outdoor facts; but to
quicken the imaginations behind the sharp eye, behind
the keen ears and the eager souls of the multitude of
children who go to school, as I used to go to school,
through an open, stirring, beckoning world of living
things that I longed to range and understand.
The best thing that I can do as writer, that you can do
as teacher, if I may quote from the last paragraph—the
keynote of these volumes—is to "go into the
fields and woods, go deep and far and frequently, with
eyes and ears and all your souls alert."
May, 1912