While teaching school near West Point he one day found, in the library of the Military Academy, a volume of Audubon--and entered upon his kingdom. Here was a complete chart of that bird world which he had never ceased to long to explore since that memorable day when he had seen the little blue warbler. There was time, too, for long walks, time to live with the birds--to revive old ties as well as to make new friends.
In speaking of his study of the birds, Mr. Burroughs once said:
“What joy the birds have brought me! How they have given me wings to escape the tedious and deadly. Studied the birds? No, I have played with them, camped with them, summered and wintered with them. My knowledge of them has come to me through the pores of my skin, through the air I have breathed, through the soles of my feet, through the twinkle of the leaves and the glint of the waters.”
At once he felt a longing to write something of the joy he was gaining through this comradeship with his feathered friends. There was nothing that spoke of Emerson or any other model in his pages now. He had found his own path. He was following the little blue bird into a world of his own.
A chance came to go to Washington to live. For several years, while working as a clerk in the Treasury, he spent all his spare moments with the birds. He knew what nests were to be found near Rock Creek and along Piney Branch. It seemed that he heard the news as soon as a flock of northbound songsters stopped to rest for a day or two in the Capitol grounds.
While watching a vault where great piles of the Nation’s gold lay stored, he lived over in memory the golden days of his boyhood spent in climbing trees, tramping over hills, and through grassy hollows, or lying with half-shut eyes by the brookside to learn something of the life-story of the birds. There were leisure afternoons which brought no duty save that of sitting watchful before the iron wall of the vault. At such times he often tried to seize some of the happy bits that memory brought, a twig here, a tuft there, and now a long, trailing strand--stray scraps of observation of many sorts--which he wove together into a nest for his brooding fancy. And we, too, as we read those pages hear the “wandering voice” of the little bird of earth and sky, who wears the warm brown of one on his breast and the blue of the other on his wings; we see the dauntless robin a-tilt on the sugar-bush; we catch the golden melody of the wood-thrush--and “the time of singing birds” has come to our hearts. He has not only seeing eyes, but an understanding heart, this seer and lover of the birds, and so his bits of observation have meaning and value. He called the book in which these various bird-papers were gathered together “Wake Robin,” the name of a wild-flower that makes its appearance at the time of the return of the birds.