pleasing of things is to see them shoot through the yet thin veil of green, give a flying peck at one, and become immediately enveloped in a little yellow cloud of the pollen. It looks, indeed, as if the bird had shaken it from its own feathers, for its intimate actions are too quick and small to be followed, and the pollen is all around it. But as the eye marks the tiny explosion with delight, reason, quickly following, as delightedly tells you the why of it, and a plucked catkin illustrates.
This is all in the early fresh morning, when the earth is like a dew-bath and all the influences so lovely that one wonders how sin and sorrow can have entered into such a world. It seems as though nature must be at her fairest for so fairy a thing to be done. I, at least, have not seen it take place later, and I cannot help hoping that no one else will.
But why do the little birds explode their catkins? Do their sharp eyes, each time, see an insect upon them, or do they really enjoy the thing for its own sake? I can see no reason why this latter should not be the case, or, even if it is not so to any great degree now, why it should not come to be so in time. It must be exciting, surely, this sudden little puff of yellow pollen-smoke, and then there is the fairy-like beauty of it. There was much laughter, naturally, when Darwin propounded the theory that birds could admire, and when he instanced the bowerbirds, and, particularly, one that makes itself an attractive little flower-garden, removing the blossoms as soon as they fade, and replacing them with fresh ones, it was held that such cases as these were decisive
