Occasionally I have seen from my study-window red-headed linnets bathing in dew when water elsewhere was scarce.  A large Monterey cypress with broad branches and innumerable leaves on which the dew lodges in still nights made favorite bathing-places.  Alighting gently, as if afraid to waste the dew, they would pause and fidget as they do before beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter the drops in showers and get as thorough a bath as they would in a pool.  I have also seen the same kind of baths taken by birds on the boughs of silver firs on the edge of a glacier meadow, but nowhere have I seen the dewdrops so abundant as on the Monterey cypress; and the picture made by the quivering wings and irised dew was memorably beautiful.  Children, too, make fine pictures plashing and crowing in their little tubs.  How widely different from wallowing pigs, bathing with great show of comfort and rubbing themselves dry against rough-barked trees!

Some of our own species seem fairly to dread the touch of water.  When the necessity of absolute cleanliness by means of frequent baths was being preached by a friend who had been reading Combe’s Physiology, in which he had learned something of the wonders of the skin with its millions of pores that had to be kept open for health, one of our neighbors remarked:  “Oh! that’s unnatural.  It’s well enough to wash in a tub maybe once or twice a year, but not to be paddling in the water all the time like a frog in a spring-hole.”  Another neighbor, who prided himself on his knowledge of big words, said with great solemnity:  “I never can believe that man is amphibious!”

Natives of tropic islands pass a large part of their lives in water, and seem as much at home in the sea as on the land; swim and dive, pursue fishes, play in the waves like surf-ducks and seals, and explore the coral gardens and groves and seaweed meadows as if truly amphibious.  Even the natives of the far north bathe at times.  I once saw a lot of Eskimo boys ducking and plashing right merrily in the Arctic Ocean.

It seemed very wonderful to us that the wild animals could keep themselves warm and strong in winter when the temperature was far below zero.  Feeble-looking rabbits scud away over the snow, lithe and elastic, as if glorying in the frosty, sparkling weather and sure of their dinners.  I have seen gray squirrels dragging ears of corn about as heavy as themselves out of our field through loose snow and up a tree, balancing them on limbs and eating in comfort with their dry, electric tails spread airily over their backs.  Once I saw a fine hardy fellow go into a knot-hole.  Thrusting in my hand I caught him and pulled him out.  As soon as he guessed what I was up to, he took the end of my thumb in his mouth and sunk his teeth right through it, but I gripped him hard by the neck, carried him home, and shut him up in a box that contained about half a bushel of hazel-and hickory-nuts, hoping that he would not be