by Samuel Scoville, Jr. With Illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull and Carton Moorepark. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. 1922. 8vo, x+184 pp. $2.00.
SAMUEL SCOVILLE, JR., at his best, — that is to say when he is treating of a phase of natural history with which he is personally familiar, — has few peers among those who write for us of the New England out-of-doors. He is at his very best in at least one chapter of his latest book. Wild Folk, a collection of stories concerning interesting animals and birds, chiefly of New England. That chapter is ‘High Sky,’in which he describes poetically and dramatically the autumn migration of the birds. With fine imagination he pictures for us incidents of the southward journey. We hear from the sky above us the honking of Canada geese and the whistle of wild wings as flocks of dripping ducks rise from the dawn-lit marshes of the northland. We mark the morning sunlight as it flashes from the plumage of the fast-flying swallows, silver and purple, and green, and steely blue; and at night, from a quiet hilltop, we watch the small dark forms of warblers flit in silhouette across the broad surface of the moon, while their brave calls, now faint, now clear as frost crystals, come down to us from the glittering pathways of the stars.
The perils of migration are suggested by a night encounter with a lighthouse, whose white beacon lures the winged voyagers to confusion and death, and by accounts of attacks by birds of prey, keen-sighted, sharp-taloned, and relentless. Thrillingly dramatic is the description of the race between that feathered bullet, the greenwinged teal, and its deadly enemy, the lightning peregrine; and no less stirring is the story of the pursuit of a golden plover by a fatal streak of silver light known as a gyrfalcon.
The author’s happy sense of humor is evidenced in almost every chapter, but especially in the ‘Path of the Air,’ the amusing adventures of a Connecticut country deacon, his wife, his hired man, and the hired man’s yellow dog, with six ducklings, the orphaned progeny of a wild drake and a decoy duck.
Mr. Scoville is distinctly at his best when writing of birds and snakes and wild flowers. His chapters dealing with the four-foots are much less convincing. The habitats are charmingly described, and there is much useful information, especially concerning the food habits of the species dealt with. But the behavior of his animals continually taxes the credulity of one familiar with the woods, and in many cases his furry characters seem to be creatures of fairyland rather than of New England fields and forests. Beautiful and informing as these chapters are, it is the opinion of the reviewer that many of the incidents described, especially the very dramatic ones, should be accepted with mental reservations, more as the children of a keen and sympathetic imagination — as things which the author believed were within the range of possibility— than as things which have foundation in known fact. With these reservations, Wild, Folk is a charming, wholesome book, which will be read with delight by anyone having a love for wild animals or an appreciation of good literature.
ERNEST HAROLD BAYNES.