I have twenty-seven guns--and I have used them all.

I stand condemned as having done more than my share toward extermination.

But that does not lessen the fact that I have learned; and in learning I have come to believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of things.

To see a bird singing on a twig means but little; but to live a season with that bird, to be with it in courting days, in matehood and motherhood, to understand its griefs as well as its gladness means a great deal.

And in my books it is my desire to tell of the lives of the wild things which I know as they are actually lived.