Two barefoot boys with bows and arrows were hunting, one September day, about the half-grown thickets of an old pasture.  The older was teaching the younger how to shoot.  A robin, a chipmunk, and two or three sparrows were already stowed away in their jacket pockets; a brown rabbit hung from the older boy’s shoulder.  Suddenly the younger raised his bow and drew the arrow back to its head.  Just in front a chickadee hung and twittered among the birch twigs.  But the older boy seized his arm.

“Don’t shoot—­don’t shoot him!” he said.

“But why not?”

“’Cause you mustn’t—­you must never kill a chickadee.”

And the younger, influenced more by a certain mysterious shake of the head than by the words, slacked his bow cheerfully; and with a last wide-eyed look at the little gray bird that twittered and swung so fearlessly near them, the two boys went on with their hunting.

No one ever taught the older boy to discriminate between a chickadee and other birds; no one else ever instructed the younger.  Yet somehow both felt, and still feel after many years, that there is a difference.  It is always so with boys.  They are friends of whatever trusts them and is fearless.  Chickadee’s own personality, his cheery ways and trustful nature had taught them, though they knew it not.  And among all the boys of that neighborhood there is still a law, which no man gave, of which no man knows the origin, a law as unalterable as that of the Medes and Persians:  Never kill a chickadee.

If you ask the boy there who tells you the law, “Why not a chickadee as well as a sparrow?” he shakes his head as of yore, and answers dogmatically:  “’Cause you mustn’t.”

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CHICKADEE’S SECRET.

If you meet Chickadee in May with a bit of rabbit fur in his mouth, or if he seem preoccupied or absorbed, you may know that he is building a nest, or has a wife and children near by to take care of.  If you know him well, you may even feel hurt that the little friend, who shared your camp and fed from your dish last winter, should this spring seem just as frank, yet never invite you to his camp, or should even lead you away from it.  But the soft little nest in the old knot-hole is the one secret of Chickadee’s life; and the little deceptions by which he tries to keep it are at times so childlike, so transparent, that they are even more interesting than his frankness.

One afternoon in May I was hunting, without a gun, about an old deserted farm among the hills—­one of those sunny places that the birds love, because some sense of the human beings who once lived there still clings about the half wild fields and gives protection.  The day was bright and warm.  The birds were everywhere, flashing out of the pine thickets into the birches in all the joyfulness of nest-building, and filling the air with life and melody.  It is poor hunting to move about at such a time.  Either the hunter or his game must be still.  Here the birds were moving constantly; one might see more of them and their ways by just keeping quiet and invisible.