The Spring of the Year Part 12

_bluets_: or "innocence" (_Houstonia crulea_).

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_the Delaware_: the Delaware River, up which they come in order to lay their eggs. As they come up they are caught in nets and their eggs or "roe" salted and made into caviar.

_Cohansey Creek_: a small river in New Jersey.

_Lupton's Meadows_: local name of meadows along Cohansey Creek.

CHAPTER II

TO THE TEACHER

Read Kipling's story in "The Second Jungle Book" called "The Spring Running." Both Jungle Books ought to be in your school library. Spring is felt on the ocean as well as over the land; life is all of one piece; the thrill we feel at the touch of spring is felt after his manner and degree by bird and beast and by the fish of the sea. Go back to the last paragraph of chapter I for the _thought_. Here I have expanded that thought of the tides of life rising. See the picture of the herring on their deep sea run on page 345 of the author's "Wild Life Near Home."

Let the chapter suggest to the pupils the mysterious powers of the minds of the lower animals.

FOR THE PUPIL

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_Mowgli_: Do you know Mowgli of "The Jungle Book"?

_Chaucer_: the "Father of English Poetry." This is one of the opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

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_migrating birds_: See "The Great Tidal Waves of Bird Life" by D. Lange, in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August, 1909.

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_The cold-blooded_: said of those animals lower than the mammals and birds, that have not four-chambered hearts and the complete double blood-circulation.

_Weymouth Back River_: of Weymouth, Ma.s.sachusetts.

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_catfish_: or horn-pout or bull-pout, see picture, page 12.

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_stickleback_: The little male stickleback builds a nest, drives the female into it to lay her eggs, then takes charge of the eggs until the fry hatch out and go off for themselves.

CHAPTER III

TO THE TEACHER

You will try to get three suggestions out of this chapter for your pupils: First, that an old tree with holes may prove to be the most _fruitful_ and interesting tree in the neighborhood, that is to say, nothing out of doors is so far fallen to pieces, dead, and worthless as to be pa.s.sed by in our nature study.

(Read to them "Second Crops" in the author's "A Watcher in the Woods.") Secondly: the humble tree-toad is well worth the most careful watching, for no one yet has told us all of his life-story. Thirdly: one of the benefits of this simple, sincere love of the out-of-doors will come to us as rest, both in mind and body, as contentment, too, and clearer understanding of what things are worth while.

FOR THE PUPIL

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_burlap petticoat_: a strip of burlap about six inches wide tied with a string and folded over about the trunks of the trees under which the night-feeding gypsy moth caterpillars hide by day. The burlaps are lifted and the worms killed.

_a peddler's stall_: In the days of the author's boyhood peddlers sold almost everything that the country people could want.

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_grim-beaked baron_: the little owl of the tree.

_keep_: an older name for castle; sometimes for the dungeon.

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_for him to call the summer rain_: alluding to his evening and his cloudy-day call as a sign of coming rain.

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_castings_: the disgorged lumps of hair and bones of the small animals eaten by the owls.

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_Altair and Arcturus_: prominent stars in the northern hemisphere.

CHAPTER IV

TO THE TEACHER

See the suggestions for the corresponding chapter in "The Fall of the Year," the first volume in this series. Lest you may not have that book at hand, let me repeat here the gist of what I said there: that you make this chapter the purpose of one or more field excursions with the cla.s.s--in order to see with your own eyes the characteristic sights of spring as recorded here; secondly, that you use this, and chapters VI and X, as school tests of the pupil's knowledge and observation of his own fields and woods; and thirdly, let the items mentioned here be used as possible subjects for the pupil's further study as themes for compositions, or independent investigations out of school hours.

The finest fruit the teacher can show is a school full of children personally interested in things. And what better things than live things out of doors?

CHAPTER V

TO THE TEACHER

I might have used a star, or the sun, or the sea to teach the lesson involved here, instead of the crow and his three broken feathers. But these three feathers will do for your pupils as the falling apple did for Sir Isaac Newton. The point of the chapter is: that the feathers like the stars must round out their courses; that this universe is a universe of law, of order, and of reason, even to the wing feathers of a crow. Try to show your pupils the beauty and wonder of order and law (not easy to do) as well as the beauty and wonder of shapes and colors and sounds, etc.