Of the second period, that of nature worship, was my first trout, another delirium.  My mother had taken me to visit one of her brothers, a farmer in the western section of New York, soon after made famous by the anti-rent war, in which my uncle was one of the “Indian Chiefs[1],” and there I went fishing in the brook that ran through his farm.  I caught a small trout and did not know what fish it might be, till I saw the crimson spots on his side and remembered that the trout in books bore them, and then I threw him on the grass and danced a wild dance around him, a powwow as furious as a red Indian’s scalp-dance, while he, poor little fingerling, jumped in the unkindly herb.  Then I caught him up and raced to the house nearly half a mile, to show him, and put him in the trough under the pump, where he arrived still gasping but alive, and where he remained for all my recollection of his fate thereafter.  But I remember that the beauty of the little creature gave me more pleasure than the capture.

[Footnote 1:  The bands which carried on what became an actual insurrection against the civic authorities were led by men disguised as red Indians and called chiefs.]

About this time I began to try to draw, and especially birds and beautiful forms, though years before I had begun to color the wood-cuts in my books.  And my mother, who had an utterly uncultivated but most tender love of art, gave up finally the oft-renewed ambition to see one of her boys in the pulpit, and made every opportunity for me to learn drawing,—­I never quite understood why, for my abilities in that line were little more than nine boys out of ten show.

It was a fortunate thing for my after-life that I lived so near the forests that all my odd time was spent in them and in the surrounding fields, and I knew every apple-tree of early fruiting for miles, and every hickory-tree whose nuts were choice; and one of the joyous experiences of the time was running down a young gray squirrel in the woods, and catching him with my bare hands, and badly bitten they were.  I took him home and tamed him perfectly, and was very happy with him, my first pet.  He used to come and sleep in my pocket, and was never kept in a cage.  My father one morning left the window of our room open, and “Bob” went out to explore, but, when he tried to find his way back again, a dog of the neighborhood, as a neighbor told us, chased him away, and to my intense grief he was shot by a hunter a few days after in the adjoining forest.  I cannot to this day see a squirrel without emotion and affectionate remembrance of “Bob.”  The love of animals, which I inherited from my father, was one of the passions of my childhood, and I had an insatiate longing for pets.