neck and dragging him into paths for which he may have no liking.  But
if fact and truth produce in the reader's mind a message for himself,
then a work has been done.  That is what I hope for in my nature books.
The American people are not and never have been lovers of wild life.  As
a nation we have gone after Nature with a gun. 

And what right, you may ask, has a confessed slaughterer of wild life
such as I have been to complain? None at all, I assure you.  I have
twenty-seven guns--and I have used them all.  I stand condemned as
having done more than my share toward extermination.  But that does not
lessen the fact that I have learned; and in learning I have come to
believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into
the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made
and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever
a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of
things.  To see a bird singing on a twig means but little; but to live a
season with that bird, to be with it in courting days, in matehood and
motherhood, to understand its griefs as well as its gladness means a
great deal.  And in my books it is my desire to tell of the lives of the
wild things which I know as they are actually lived.  It is not my