I found myself in my bed the next morning. I found the small boys in their beds. I found the big round sun in the sky that morning and not a star in sight! There was nothing unusual to be seen up there, nothing mysterious at all. But there was something unusual, something mysterious to be seen in the four small faces at the breakfast-table that morning--eyes all full of stars and deep with the far, dark depths of the midnight sky into which they had gazed--into which those four small boys had flown!
We had often heard the geese go over before, but never such a flock as this, never such wild waking clangor, so clear, so far away, so measured, swift, and--gone!
I love the sound of the ocean surf, the roar of a winter gale in the leafless woods, the sough of the moss-hung cypress in the dark southern swamps. But no other voice of Nature is so strangely, deeply thrilling to me as the _honk_, _honk_, _honk_ of the passing geese.
For what other voice, heard nowadays, of beast or bird is so wild and free and far-resounding? Heard in the solemn silence of the night, the notes fall as from the stars, a faint and far-off salutation, like the call of sentinels down the picket line--"All's well! All's well!" Heard in the open day, when you can see the winged wedge splitting through the dull gray sky, the notes seem to cleave the dun clouds, driven down by the powerful wing-beats where the travelers are passing high and far beyond the reach of our guns.
The sight of the geese going over in the day, and the sound of their trumpetings, turn the whole world of cloud and sky into a wilderness, as wild and primeval a wilderness as that distant forest of the far Northwest where the howl of wolves is still heard by the trappers. Even that wilderness, however, is passing; and perhaps no one of us will ever hear the howl of wolves in the hollow snow-filled forests, as many of our parents have heard. But the _honk_ of the wild geese going over we should all hear, and our children should hear; for this flock of wild creatures we have in our hands to preserve.
The wild geese breed in the low, wet marshes of the half-frozen North, where, for a thousand years to come they will not interfere with the needs of man. They pass over our northern and middle states and spend the winter in the rivers, marshes, and lagoons of the South, where, for another thousand years to come, they can do little, if any, harm to man, but rather good.