Nor can you tell where the most sedate and straightforward one which you can pick out will lead you, except that you know it will be continually through a land of delight, and that Eden is bound to be just ahead of you.
It is difficult to understand, though, in all seriousness, how these roads persist. Wood cut off over extensive areas grows up again in thirty or forty years and fills in the gap in the forest till no trace of it remains, yet the roads by which it was carted to the highway, leading once as directly as possible, seem still to have some subtle power of resistance wherebythey are not overgrown, though they lose their directness. After a few years it seems as if, glad to be relieved of any responsibility, they took to strolling aimlessly about, meeting one another and separating again casually.
I never see a wood-cart coming out with a load, yet the road seems as definite in marking as it did a half-century ago. But that is one of the fascinations of the region. You take the same road as usual, and by it you come out at some strange and hitherto unheard-of garden of delight. It is like the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, where one story leads into another and you wander on with always a new climax just ahead of you.
Out of the great pudding-stone boulders of this region, of which you may find specimens as large as an ordinary dwelling-house standing in lonely dignity, youmay see cunning workmen making soil for the nourishment of these forest trees. Here will be a round blot of yellow-gray lichen, perhaps aParmelia conspersa, clinging to the smoothest surface of flint with ease and sending down its microscopic rhizoids into the tiniest crevice between the round pebble, which is the plum, and the slate which makes the body of the pudding.
On another part of the boulder you may find a slanting surface, where the parmelia’s work is already done. Its tiny root-organs have dissolved off and split away enough of the slate to loosen some tiny pebbles, which fall to the ground as gravel, leaving hollows in which dew and dead lichens make a soil for the roots of soft pads of mosses. Some of the boulders over here are like Western buttes, densely tenanted by these hardycliff-dwellers, the many-footed rock lovers finding foothold where you would hardly think the lichens even would survive.
I never tramp these roads, which it sometimes seems as if the pukwudgies moved about in the night for the confusion of men, without being lost, at least for a time, and finding a new boulder to worship. Once, thus lost, I found a little gem of a pond, which hides in the hollows a half-mile or so east from Ponkapog Pond. This, too, I fear the pukwudgies move about in the night, for I hear of many men who have found it once and sought it again in vain.
To-day I came upon it once more,—a cup of clear water in the hollow of the forest’s hand, smiling up at the sky with neither inlet or outlet. The black ducks had found it, too. They greeted my approaching footsteps with quacks of alarm,and I had hardly rounded the bushes on the bank before sixteen of them, with much splashing, rose heavily into the air and sailed off toward the big pond.
Even in their fright I noticed that they went out as the animals did from the ark,—two by two,—and I smiled, for it is one more sign of spring. I noticed the crows in couples to-day for the first time. A few black duck breed hereabout, and the little pond with the button-bushes growing along one shallow shore as thick as mangroves in a West India swamp might well be considered by house-hunting couples. Sitting under a mountain laurel whose leaves furnish the only shade on the bank, I watched quietly for nearly half an hour. Then there was a soft swish of sailing wings, and a pair dropped lightly in without splash enough to be heard. Yet there was little to see,after all. They simply sat mirrored in the motionless water for another half-hour by the town clock, looking adoration into one another’s eyes, then snuggled close and swam in among the button-bushes as if with one foot. That was all. It was a veritable quaker-meeting love-making; but just the same I shall look for the nest among the button-bush mangroves in another month, and I do hope that pukwudgies will not have mixed the wood roads and hidden the pond so well that I cannot find it.
THE pond is a mile long, but it is shallow, with a level bottom that was once a peat meadow, and the water, holding some of this peat in solution, has a fine amber tinge. It is as if the sphagnums that wrought for ages in the bog and died to give it its black levels held in reserve vast stores of their own rich wine reds and mingled them with the yellows of hemlock heart-wood and the soft tan of marsh grasses that lie dead, all robed in funereal black at the pond bottom.
By what mystery of alchemy the water compounds during its winter wait under the thick ice this amethystine glow in itspellucid depths I do not know, but the spring sunlight always shows it as it sends its shafts down into the quivering shallows, and it creams the foam that fluffs beneath the gate of the old dam and flows seaward.
This gate is always lifted a little and the stream never fails. In spring its brimming volume floods the meadows and roars down miniature rocky gorges,—a soothing lullaby of a roar that you may hear crooning in at your window of an April night to surely sing you to sleep. In summer the gateman comes along and puts a mute on the stream by dropping the gate a little, and it lisps and purls through the little gorges, slipping from one rock-bound pool to another.
In April the suckers come up, breasting the flood from another pond a half-mile down stream, to spawn; great,sturdy, lithe, shiny-sided fellows they are, at this time of year almost as beautiful and as alert as salmon, weighing sometimes five or six pounds. The same intoxication which makes the flood froth and dance and shout as it tumbles down the steeps from meadow to meadow seems to thrill in their veins and give them strength to cleave an arrow flight through the quivering rapids and gambol up the falls with an exultant agility that seems strange in this fish that is so sluggish and dull on the pond bottom in midsummer.
Adam’s ale is brewed the year round, but it is the spring drought that works miracles of agility in the blood of somber creatures. Winter fishes are like some middle-class Englishmen sitting glum and motionless in their stalls. Only when tapster Spring draws the ale and the barmaid brooks dance blithely down with foaming mugs do we learn how jovial and athletic they may be. Thus the suckers, suddenly waking to exuberant activity, swim the frothing current, leap the miniature falls like gleaming salmon, and congregate just below the dam.
Some years the gateman has kindly instincts at just the psychological moment and comes over and shuts down the gate of a Saturday afternoon in the presence of many boys, in whose veins also froths the exultant foam of spring joy. Then, indeed, does low water spell Waterloo for the suckers. In the shoaling current they flee down stream, seeking the deeper pools and hiding under stones in water-worn hollows wherever they can find refuge.
There is a crude instrument, formerly a familiar output of the local blacksmith, known as a sucker spear. It is composed of two cast-off horseshoes, one being straightened and welded across the other in the middle of the bend. This gives a rough imitation of Neptune’s trident with the three prongs a good half-inch broad and usually sharpened to a cutting edge. Mounted on a long pole it is complete, and its possession makes of a boy a vengeful Poseidon having dominion over the shallows of the brook. Boys who know no better because they have been taught by their elders that this is the way to do it, “spear” suckers with these instruments. A handy youngster can guillotine a five-pound fish into two separate, bloody sections with this plunging death, and fork the limp and quivering remnants up on the bank with it.
Even the boy who does it, though he whoops with the wild delight of bloody conquest, knows that this is not sport.There is a better way to catch suckers, and he who has once learned it willingly discards the crude instrument of the blacksmith for the fine touch of the true sportsman. He matches boy against fish, and feels the man thrill through his marrow every time he wins. It is the same game that great John Ridd learned from his primitive forbears on the West of England’s moors, whereby he went forth to tickle trout in the icy stream and was led into the enchanted valley where dwelt huge outlaws—and Lorna Doone.
Bare-legged and bare-armed you wade into the icy water and slip your hands gently under the big stones at bottom, wherever there are crevices into which a fish might enter. If you have the requisite fineness of touch, experience will soon tell you what it is you feel beneath in the darkness of the watery cave. It may benothing but the fine play of currents across your fingers, in which all sensitiveness and expectation seem to center. It is wonderful how much soul crowds down into your finger-tips when they feel for something you cannot see in places where things may bite.
There may be a turtle there, and if so you have leave to withdraw. It may be an eel, and you need not mind, for the eel will take care of himself; you can no more grasp him than you can the quivering currents. It is customary to expect water-snakes, and there is a fineness of delight about the dread that the expectation inspires that is just a little more than mortal. Orpheus, seeking dead Eurydice, must have turned the corners on the way down with some such feeling. Perhaps it is because the dread is groundless that it is so deific. It has no basis in thesenses, but is purely a creature of the finer imaginings. The water-snake is harmless if by any chance he could be there. But there is no chance of this. At the sucker time of the year he is still sleeping his winter sleep, tucked away in some rock crevice of the upper bank, safe from flood and frost.
If you prod crudely the big fish will take flight and rush to another hiding place. But if you are wise and careful enough you will feel something swaying in the current and stroking your fingers like the soft touch of a feather duster. It is the big fellow’s tail and you will soon learn better than to grab it. The muscular strength of one of these big fish is beyond belief. Howsoever tight your grip on him here, he will swing his body from side to side with such force and swiftness that he will writhe from yourhold before you can get him out of water.
That is not the way to do it. Instead, you cunningly slip your hand gently along from his tail toward his head. You will likely go over your rolled-up sleeve; perhaps it will be necessary to plunge shoulder and even head in the effort to reach far enough.
Having discounted the Plutonian water-snakes you will find this but giving zest to the game; indeed, it is doubtful if you know that it has happened until it is all over. Your palm slides gingerly over the dorsal fin and goes on till you feel the gentle waving of the pectorals. Then suddenly you grip a thumb and finger into the gills, showing the iron hand through the velvet, and with one strong surge lift your fish from beneath his rock and fling him high upon the bank.
There is a fundamental joy in this kind of fishing that you can get in no other. If there were fish in the rivers of Paradise Adam caught them for Eve in this way. I have always been sorry that big John Ridd found nothing but fingerling trout on his way up the little stream that led to the Doone Valley. He should have tackled our brook in April.
Along the stream to-day, noting the pussy-willows all out in spring garments of pearl gray and the alders swaying and sifting yellow dust from their open stamens, I passed the spot where Bose and I met as early a spring run of fish as often occurs. Bose would corroborate it if he could, but, unfortunately, Bose is somewhat dead, as much so as a dog of his spirit and imagination can be. His bones lie decently buried down under the great oak where he loved to sit and thinkabout foxes, but I am not so sure about the rest of it. If there are any happy hunting-grounds where the souls of game flee away I warrant Bose leads the pack. He was a full-blooded foxhound, deep-chested, musical, lop-eared; and he didn’t know a fox from a buff cochin. He hunted continually, but rarely on a real trail. His nose was for visions.
It was on a first day of April that we came out of the door together, and Bose took one sniff, lifted his head, bayed musically, and was off into the pasture with me following, both of us ripe for any adventure. There was a smell of spring in the air; indeed, I was not sure but it was the green-robed, violet-crowned goddess whom the dog set forth to hunt. If so, I was more than glad to follow, for the winters seem long in my town. We know that the sun-god is pursuing Daphnenorthward. We have signs of her in the yearning of willow twigs and the shy blooming of hepaticas. If she should already be hiding in some sunny, sheltered nook of the pasture Bose would be as likely to go after her as any other vision.
March had gone out like a lamb, trailing a shorn fleece of mists behind him,—mists that morning sun tinted with opal fires that burned out after a little and left pale-blue ashes smeared in the hollows and blown soft against the distant hills. All through the air thrilled the glamor of those new-born hopes that attend the goddess, and I wanted to give tongue with Bose when I found him quartering the barberry slope of the upper pasture with clumsy gallop.
He had led me plump into fairy-land at the first plunge, for the brown leavesof last year rustled with the tread of brownies, and I came up in time to see a fat gnome rolling along, humping his shoulders and jiggling with laughter before the uproarious onslaught of the dog, turning at the burrow’s mouth to grin in the teeth of eager jaws and vanish into thin air as they clicked. A woodchuck? So Hodge would call it, seeing according to his kind. Probably Bose knew it for a fox, a silver-gray at least, according to his foxhound dreams. I myself knew that spring glamor was on all the woodland and that this was a round-paunched gnome, guardian of buried treasure, out for an April day frolic, and going back reluctantly to his post after having a moment’s fun with the dog.
As for the brownies, they were signs, or rather forerunners, pacemakers to thespring. I could see the little black eyes and droll-pointed noses of them as they worked eagerly all about in the shrubbery, passing the word that the goddess might arrive at any moment and that it was time to dress for her. Now they whispered it to terminal buds, and now to lateral, but mostly they put their brown heads down among the leaves, giving the message to bulb and corm, tuber and root stock. I could hear them calling all about, a quaint little elfin note of “tseep, tseep,” and anon one would turn a roguish handspring and vanish, thus hocus-pocusing himself to the next northward grove.
Busy brownies they were,—hop-o’-my-thumbs clad in rufous-brown feather coats that so harmonized with the dead leaves among which they worked that it was difficult to see them except when they moved. Ornithologists, bound by the letter of their knowledge, would, I dare say, name these fox sparrows; but even these might have hesitated and forgotten their literalness, looking into newborn April’s smiling face that blue-misted morning, out trailing the spring with Bose.
Then, much like the brownies, Bose vanished. He seemed to have lost the trail, nor was my scent keener, though all about were signs. The maple twigs were decorated with rosettes of red and yellow in honor of her coming. Birch twigs reddened with them, and the woodland that had been gray was fairly blushing with tell-tale color. Over on an open, sandy hillside the cinquefoil buds were beginning to curl upward, and in the heart of violet leaves faint hints of blue made you think of sleepy children just opening a little of one eye at promise of morning.
Here, too, I was conscious of a faint, ethereally fine perfume that seemed to float suddenly to my senses as if it had come over the treetops from the south. From up stream came the babble of the brook like dainty laughter. If I had heard the swish of silken garments floating away in the direction from which these came I had not been surprised. Eagerly I turned and followed where they led me.
Soon I heard Bose again, a half-mile behind; he, too, had caught the trail. Baying eagerly, he galloped by a few minutes later, interjecting into his uproar by some strange method of dog elocution a whine of recognition and an invitation to follow.
So he went on down the pasture. No leaf bud had opened, though many were agape, ready to burst with the pulse ofnew life that throbbed through the twigs and heightened their colors. The swamp blueberry bushes and the wild smilax were the greener for it, just as the maples and birches were the redder. With your ear to the bark you might hear the thrumming of the sap in the cambium layers, practicing a second to the drone of bees to come a little later. And still the fairy fine scent lured me, and I could hear Bose’s voice, eager to incoherence, just ahead. If you did not know about his visions you would surely think he had a fox in his jaw and was shaking him.
Down a sunny slope, robed in the diaphanous gray-green of bursting birch-buds, the fairy odor led me to a little bower on the bank, where for a moment I saw the nymph herself stand, rosy pink, slender and sweet, gowned in the birch-bud color all shimmered with the yellowof alder pollen drawn in filmy gauze about her. Strange goblins in silvery brown danced in grotesque gambols at her feet, while behind the bank I heard the splashing of Bose in shallow water, frenzied howls of excitement and ecstasy followed each time by another of the clumsy goblins somersaulting up from below to join the dance. Fairy-land and goblin town had indeed come together in celebration of the arrival of the spring!
On the threshold of this realm I trod a moment bewildered, and then, stumbling, broke the spell with a hasty exclamation. The enchantment vanished like a dream. Standing by the brookside I saw only the homely world again. Yet it was a strange enough sight. Up at the dam the gate had suddenly been closed, and a dozen three-pound fish, on their way up to spawn, had been marooned in the shallowwater. These Bose was shaking up in wild delight and tossing up on the bank, where they danced in clumsy, fish-out-of-water dismay. These were the dancing goblins; nor had I been very far wrong about Daphne. There she stood still, slender and dainty, only, just as when pursued by Apollo of old, she had turned into a shrub. There she stood, the Daphne mezereum of the elder botanists, the clustering blooms of pink sending forth their faint, sweet odor that had come so far down the pasture to Bose and me and sent us hunting visions.
To be sure, it was the first of April! But the joke was not all on us, for Bose had for once found real game, albeit such as foxhound never hunted before, and I had found the spring. Two bluebirds, house-hunting among the willows, caroled in confirmation of it, and Apollo himself,shining through the gray mist of birch twigs, kissed Daphne rapturously.
She was so sweet that I did not blame him. As for Bose, he actually came up and licked the blushing twigs, then in sudden confusion at being caught in such sentimental actions, tore off on the make-believe trail of more visions, leaving me to rescue his gamboling goblins and put them back into their native water.
TO-DAY I remind myself forcibly of Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G. C., M. P. C., whose paper entitled “Speculations on the Sources of the Hampstead Ponds” was received with such enthusiasm on the part of the Pickwick Club, for I have made new discoveries of the sources of Ponkapog Pond. These are quite as astounding to me as were the Hampstead revelations to the Pickwick Club, and just as those sent Mr. Pickwick and his friends forth on new voyages, so these led me to a hitherto undiscovered country.
In spite of our increasing population and our progressive business activity, there are portions of eastern Massachusetts towns that are forgotten. Oftenthese are large tracts where the foot of man rarely treads and the creatures of the wilderness roam and prey, breed and die undisturbed by civilization. They may hear the hoot of the factory whistle morning, noon, and evening, or the faint echoes of the distant roar of trains, but they give no heed.
Their world is the wilderness and their problem that of living with their forest neighbors. Man hardly enters into their arrangements. Now and then one of these tracts has a past that is related to humanity, though the casual passer would never suspect it. The wilderness sweeps over the trail of man gleefully and his monuments must be built high and strong or they will be swept away with a rapidity that is startling.
It is only by perpetual efforts that we hold on to our landmarks. The rain willcome in between the shingles and, beginning with the roof, sweep your house into the cellar just a mass of brown mold before you know it. Then the frost and sun tumble the cellar wall in upon it, and where once your proud dwelling stood is a grass-grown hollow. To-day’s generation trips on the capstone of what was the tower of its ancestors and thinks it merely a projection of the earth’s rib, which it is and to which it has returned.
I fancy every old Massachusetts town has these woodland places that were once the hopeful clearings of early settlers. Now and then, roaming the deep wood where only the creatures of the primal forest seem to have freehold tenure, I find an alien has strayed from the elder years, a hermit of the wood and of our own time. I know a purple lilac that dwells thus serenely, miles from present-day habitations, in a scrub forest that was fifty years ago a stretch of cathedral pines. Only long search showed me the faint hollow in the brown earth which was once the narrow cellar of a wee house. No record of an early householder here remains other than that planted by the hopeful housewife’s hand,—the lilac shrub.
For more than a century it has held the ground where its fellow-pioneers planted it, holding close within its pinky heart-wood memories of English lanes white with hawthorne and, far beyond these, indistinct recollections of rose-perfumed Persian gardens, the home of its race. Perhaps upon its ancestral root rested the feet of Omar Khayyam when he wrote:
And when like her, O Saki, you shall passAmong the guests star-scattered on the grass,And in your blissful errand reach the spotWhere I made one—turn down an empty glass.
And when like her, O Saki, you shall passAmong the guests star-scattered on the grass,And in your blissful errand reach the spotWhere I made one—turn down an empty glass.
And when like her, O Saki, you shall passAmong the guests star-scattered on the grass,And in your blissful errand reach the spotWhere I made one—turn down an empty glass.
Perhaps within the fragrance of a blossom that sprang from the same stock old Cromwell and his Ironsides paused some May morning and breathed deep and sang a surly hymn. We propagate the lilac from the root, not the seed, and the same sap has flowed through the veins of the present strain for a thousand years. A whiff of lilac perfume in a woodland tangle next month, and out of the wilderness we step, from one ancient garden to another, back by centuries into the pleasant places of a world long gone.
To many a New England child the smell of lilacs brings homesickness, and he does not know why. It is because it is the May odor of the vanished home garden, not only of Myles and Priscilla of Plymouth, but of a thousand generations of his own stock before them.
The woodland of to-day’s discoveriesis not such. I do not believe pioneer ever stoned a cellar in its depths, and if the Indian set his teepee here it was only in passing. Now and then the harrying hand of man has cut off its greater growth and let the sunlight in on its roots, that the adventitious buds may have a chance, and newer and stronger trunks tower upward eventually, but the shadows that dapple its brown-leaf mold carry no dreams of human domination.
The vexation of axe and gun, and even the searing scar of flame, are only minor incidents in the great work of the wood, whose ultimate purpose no man knows. We see the rocks disintegrated and the hollows filled with richer soil, that the forest may grow taller and more surely shelter the gentler things of earth. We find it holding back the waters in its cunningly contrived bogs, and hiding medicinal plants in its hollows, waiting always with benediction in its leaves for the comforting of weary men; but we feel when we know the woods best that these, too, are but its casual benefits; its great purpose lies deeper, and the more we seek it the better we know we are.
Great men come out of the forests of the earth. If they are not born there they seek the place before coming to their greatness. Lincoln hews rails, Washington surveys and scouts, and Roosevelt ranches in the Western wilderness. Perhaps it is for these and their kin that the woods exist. It is always Peter the Hermit that leads the crusade, and without crusades the world were a poor place. It seems as if all our prophets must wrestle at least forty days in the wilderness before coming forth with brows white with the mark of immortality.
It lies at the southeast corner of the pond, beginning at the little bogs, from which it springs abruptly. Along the water’s edge of these bogs picknickers row their boats all summer long, and catch fish and eat sandwiches. Inland, a foot or two, the duck hunter in the autumn treads precariously along the quaking surface with his eyes on the margin, or perhaps on the ducks that swim in the open pond, but rarely does any one penetrate the bog-carpeted swamp of great cedars just back of this quaking margin.
And this is strange. The passion for exploration is born in all hearts. We are prompted to go to Tibet, or seek the sources of the Nile, or penetrate the jungles that lie between the Amazon and the Orinoco. I have felt this impulse strongly myself, and longing for distant lands have passed unnoticed this opportunity right at hand for penetrating an untrodden wilderness. With most of us the undiscovered country lies just a step off the beaten track. So across the rolling bog and into the twilight greenness beneath the cedars I sailed to-day, venturing as Columbus did over a known sea to an unknown, and thence to a new world,—one where straight, limbless cedar trunks stand close like temple columns under a gray-green roof of twigs and leaves.
All the upper tones are gray and green, for this is the world of the mosses and lichens. The ground is built of them, and the temple columns are so covered with their arabesques and bas-reliefs, so daintily frescoed and carved, that it seems as if here were a museum of all designs for the beautifying of interiors that ever occurred. And as all the tree trunks are gray and green till the texture and colorof bark is hardly to be discerned, so the carpeting of the floor of this temple and the upholstering of its furniture is brown and green. The thin rays of the sun that filter through here and there are greenish gold, till the whole gives an under-water atmosphere to the place, and you walk about as a diver might on the sea-bottom, with things new and strange floating at every hand.
Mosses in the ordinary woodland we are apt to pass with unseeing eye. They decorate rocks and trees, dead stumps and earth with such unobtrusive good taste that we come back feeling the beauty of the woodland, and not at all knowing what made it. Some fence corner or group of trees or shrubs or a stump has touched us with its beauty, and so well dressed it is in its moss clothes that we have not seen them at all, but have comeaway only with the recollection of how well the rock or the stump looked, and we cannot say whether it wore a plaid or a check or just plain goods.
In this swamp, however, it is as if the whole woodland wardrobe were hung up for inspection, an Easter opening of all kinds of wood wear. Here theUsnea barbatatrails its old man’s beard from the cedar limbs well up in the arches above the pillars, its drooping softness having the effect of delicate tapestry. Clinging lichens, those delicate unions of algal cells and fond fungi, paint the northerly sides of the tree trunks all the way down, while the freer-growing fringe or fleck the southern exposures.Parmeliasto north,cetrariasandstictasto the south might well guide the wanderer, giving him the points of the compass and leading him thus to his path again.
Under foot thesphagnumsbuild the bog and hold chief sway, but other common varieties dispute the footing with them. Here is theacutifoliawith its pointed leaves giving the tufts the appearance of a bunch of pointed petaled chrysanthemums, the greens and purples softly shading into one another and showing a fine contrast with the drier, yellower portions of the plant. Here, too, is the edelweiss-likesquarrosumin its loosely-crowded clusters of bluish green, and the robustcymbifolium.
All these grow from their own débris in the wettest portions of the footing. Wherever there is, in this many-colored and lovely carpet, a dead cedar trunk the dainty cedar moss, creeping everywhere, has occupied the space with its delicate fern-like leaves, making of all ugly rotten wood the loveliest furnishing imaginablefor these solemn, twilight spaces. Cushion mosses pad with their bluish-green velvet hassocks here and there, and, sitting on one of them that I might put all my wit into seeing, I noted for the first time, though growing all about me, in fact, a moss that I had never seen before,—themnium.
Its delicate, translucent green leaves are little like those of a moss at first sight. One thinks it rather some rare and delicate flowering plant of the wet bog, now but thrusting up its delicate leaves, to bloom later. I dare say themnium punctatumis a common bog moss. Very likely I have trampled it ruthlessly under foot before this in following some more showy denizen of the deep woods; but to find it thus, exploring a new swamp for the first time, it gave me as great pleasure as I might have had in findinga new orchid hiding about the sources of the Orinoco.
It was thesphagnumsthat led me to the brookside and caused me to recall that lusty scientist, Mr. Pickwick, and his discovery of the sources of the Hampstead ponds. And while I stood and wondered I saw a second brook, only a little further on, also flowing downward into thesphagnumand losing itself in the bog, to pass beneath the cedar roots and moss débris and enter the pond.
Some ancient traveler, perhaps Marco Polo, passing from Babylon to Bagdad, coming first upon the Euphrates and then the Tigris, may have felt some of the amazement and delight which I had in this discovery. Never before had I known of a brook entering the pond. It had always been a sheet of water self-contained and sufficient in itself, fed, Ithought, by springs beneath its own surface. I had paddled by and tramped over the mouths of these two brooks a hundred times and never knew before why the pond always smiled and dimpled as I went by. No wonder it laughs; it has kept that same joke on ninety-nine of a hundred of the people who frequent it, and I am not sure there is another hundredth.
It seemed as if all the woodland burst into guffaws of laughter, now that the joke was out and there was no further need of keeping quiet about it. The cedars rocked in the west wind with suppressed merriment and a couple of red squirrels snickered like school children and tore up and down the lichen-covered trunks and fell off into a swamp birch and had hardly strength to hold on, so breathless were they. A pair of crows,looking up nesting material, haw-hawed right out over my head till they had to stop flapping and sail, they were so weak from it, and a whole flock of chickadees tittered all along behind my back for a quarter of a mile as I went on up the swamp on the left bank of the Euphrates.
It was amusing, and after a little I could see the joke and laugh myself. The Tigris was on my right, and by-and-by the two began to prattle down over a hard bottom from higher ground. Only for a little way, though, for here we came to another wide swamp which the two traversed under low sprouts of swamp maple and birch, the ground having been cut over within a few years.
And right here I ran into a full chorus, a raucous cacophony, an Homeric din that sounded as if all the rough-voiced goblins between Blue Hill and the Berkshires wereassembled in convention up stream and had just heard the story, particularly well told. I knew them. They were the wood frogs, holding their annual convention, indeed, in the water all along the marshy margin of the swamp. Once a year they come down, as people go to the seashore, disporting themselves in the waves and making very merry about it. They were not laughing at me. They were simply shouting their happiness at being thawed out and finding it springtime once more.
Their voices, pitched about an octave below middle C, and all on one note, sound not unlike a great flock of ducks gabbling wildly, but they are really more nearly musical than that. After the convention is over they go back to the woods, where you will find them sitting among the leaves, though you will never see them till they see you. And when you do seethem they are in the air. They have surprisingly long legs and can jump tremendously, turning in the air as they go, so that, having landed, their next leap will take them in a new direction. The earth seems to swallow them as they touch it, for their coloration is that of the brown leaves, and they leap from one invisibility to the next.
Beyond the frog chorus I found my stream again, dancing daintily along hemlock shaded shallows and rippling over slate ledges in the latticed shade of oak and maple twigs, and here another voice called me, a staccato whistle with a suspicion of a trill in it now and then, the voice of the very spirit of the spring woodland,—thehyla. I have called it a whistle, yet it is hardly that; it is rather the soft rich tone of a pipe, such as Pan might have imitated when he first blew into the hollow reed on the brook margin.
He is a shy fellow, this inch-long brown frog that swells his throat till it is like a balloon and pipes forth this mellow note, and he is even more invisible than the wood-frog. You may seek him diligently for years and not find him, for his voice is that of a ventriloquist and he seems to send it hither and thither. It is as if this were a trick of some frisky Ariel of the wood that danced about and whistled, now before and now behind you. When the trill comes in it you may well think the tricksy spirit is laughing at you so that his voice shakes. It would be no surprise if some trilling note ended in a giggle and Ariel himself should float by you on the mocking air.
The great chorus of spring peepers is to come later; now, but an occasional one has waked from his frosty nest beneath the woodland leaves and come down tothe water margin to sing. Nor do I know whether it was the ventriloquial call of one that sounded now ahead and now behind, now above and now below, or whether relays of jovial invisible sprites passed me on from pool to pool. What I do know is that, a mile or more beyond its outlet under the ooze of the little bog, I found the source of my Euphrates in springs that boil clear through the sand and send forth the cool, pure water for the delectation of all who will come to drink.
Here upon the margin I heard another chorus that repaid me for all the rough laughter of the wood-goblin frogs,—the plaintive melodies of a little flock of vesper sparrows, newly arrived and very happy about it. These come later than the song sparrows, and bring a quality of wistfulness in their song which in thisdiffers from the bluff heartiness of the earlier bird. It is as if their joy in the strong sun and the awakening of creation was tempered and softened to a touch of tears at some gentle remembrance. The vesper sparrows recall the vanished happiness of past summers in their greeting to that which comes.
After that my way led me home through the purpling woodland toward the golden greeting of the sunset. I had tasted to the full the joy of exploration and discovery. I doubt if Humboldt felt any better coming back from his exploration of the sources of the Caspian. My Euphrates I know; my Tigris I have reserved for future, perhaps even greater joy of tracing to its source in the mystic depths of, to me, untrodden woodland.
JUST as in midsummer the people of the little pasture and woodland hollows must envy those of the hilltop their cool, breezy outlook, so in mid-April the thought must be reversed. For still the warfare between the north wind and the sun which began in February skirmishes and reached its Gettysburg in late March, goes fitfully on, with Appomattox hardly in sight.
The South is to win in this fratricidal struggle though, and in the summer millennium of peace and prosperity the two forces will join hands and work for the good of the whole land. Already the warriors of the North are driven to the hilltops, where they still shout defiance, and whence they rush in determined raidson the valleys below. It is a losing fight, for all day long the golden forces of the sun roll up the land and fill all the hollows and hold them in serene warmth and peace. However hard last night’s frost, however stiff the gale overhead, I can always find bowl-shaped depressions where summer already coaxes the winter-worn woodland.
The very first squatters in this land, whose presence antedates those people of record who held land by deeds and grants, seem to have found and loved these little sun-warmed hollows too, for in them I find the only traces of this pioneer occupation. Records in ink or on parchment of these pioneers are few, indeed, and these which they left on the land itself are but slight. Here a depression may show where a tiny cellar was dug, though no trace of stone work will be found. It was easier for the pioneer to frame his cellarwall of logs, just as he built those of the house above it.
You may find by careful search the worn path to the spring nearby, for that which is written on the earth itself remains visible long after inscriptions on stone are gone. The wind and the sun, the frost and the rain, will erase the carving from your marble tablet. But the path across a plain, once worn deep and firm by many passing feet, will always show its tracing to the discerning eye. Perhaps a huge old apple-tree stump may have lasted till now, even showing faint signs of life, and round about what was the immediate dooryard the trees of the wood may cluster; but they will hold back and leave some open space, as if they still respected invisible bounds set by the long departed human occupant.
There seem to be many such sleepy hollows in my town, spots where dreamsdwell and the once trodden earth clings tenaciously to the prints of long-vanished feet. Over their tops to-day the north wind sings his war song, but his failing arrows fall to earth harmless, for golden troops of sunshine roll over the southern rim and fill the space below with quivering delight.
Just to walk about in this sunshine is a pleasure, and to sit in the pioneer’s hollow land and let it flood your marrow is to be thrilled with a primal joy that is the first the race has to remember. It antedates the first man by unknown millions of years. The same sun touched with the same joy the first primordial cell. With the thrill the one quivered into two and thus came the origin of species.
To-day in such a hollow and under such a sun the pageant of woodland life passed before me, much as it may have passedbefore the pioneer as he sat on his log doorstep and rested perhaps from labors in the cornfield, whose hills of earth still checker the level, sandy plain behind his hollow. Strange that the brawny, seventeenth-century adventurer should be but vanished dust and a dream, while the loam that he stirred with careless hoe holds the form that he gave it more than two hundred years ago! Five or six times his cornfield has matured a forest, and the great trees have been cut down and carted away, and yet the corn hills linger. Thus easily does the clay outlast the potter.
When I first marched into the tiny clearing the place was silent, brown and deserted, but that is the way of the woodland, and we soon learn to understand it. A certain aboriginal courtesy is required before you are allowed to become one of the company. Thus among the Eskimos youenter an assembly and sit quietly a moment until one of those already present notices and speaks to you. In this way you are admitted to fellowship. It is very bad taste for the newcomer to speak first.
So at first I noticed only the brown of last year’s grasses, the dead stems of goldenrod and aster, of St. John’s-wort and mullein. A tiny cloud slid across the face of the sun and a scout of the north wind blew down the slope and chilled the golden glow of sunlight with which the hollow had seemed filled to the brim. Looking down into it from a sheltered spot on the rim, I had thought the place full of dreams of June. As I sat down in the shadow on the pioneer’s grass-plot with the scouting north wind at my back, it was rather a recollection of November.
A dead leaf, frightened by that scurrying wind, dashed down over the tree tops and lighted, a brown splash on the pale, dead grass. Then all in a moment the cloud blew by, the north wind saw the enemy all about him in force and dashed over the rim of the hill, the amber warmth of the sun descending and filling the cup to the brim with the gentle ecstasy of returning summer.
In the still radiance the brown leaf floated into the air again, hovered a moment before my very eyes, and lighted near by on the gray bones of what had once been the pioneer’s apple tree. Thus I received my introduction. I had been spoken to by one of the people of the place, received my accolade as it were, and was privileged to see clearly. For the brown leaf was not a brown leaf at all, but a hunter’s butterfly.
It is astonishing to find already so manyforms of frail life stirring in the sun, though just a night or two ago the thermometer registered ten degrees of frost, and the ground was frozen solid the next morning. Here was my hunter’s butterfly, a wee dab of pulpy cell that a touch of my finger could crush, borne on wings of gossamer frailness that might be whipped to tatters by a wind-snapped twig, yet sailing serenely about, defying anything to harm him.
The strange part of it is that he has been somewhere hereabouts all winter long. All about in the pastures are the frail ghosts of last year’s cudweed, on which as a caterpillar he fed. But it is six months at least since he cast off his chrysalis skin and emerged in his present form to face bitter winds and a constantly lowering temperature, days of chilling rain, smothering snow, and ice that coatedall things with an inch-thick armor for days. All the wrecks that these might have caused him he has in some mysterious fashion escaped, and here he is, as merry as a grig.
He did not seem to be hungry, unless, like me, he was eager to devour the sunshine. He sat on the gray, weather-worn, fallen trunk of the ancient apple tree, his wings gently rising and falling, while I noted the beauty of his rich reds with their black and white markings and margins of black just tipped with a blueish tinge on the tips of the fore wings. Then he closed them for a minute, showing me the dark blurring of the under parts that had made me think him a dead leaf as he blew over the ridge with the wind, though now I could note the blue ocelli of the after wings.
It was only for a moment that he restedmotionless thus, and it was hard not to think him a chip of ancient bark or a fragment of a leaf, then he flipped himself into the air and was off over the hill again in a tremendous hurry. All butterflies get occasional aerograms and go off as if on a matter of life or death in response to the messages, but it seems as if these over-winter chaps were especially subject to them in the first warm days. Later an angle-wing came down into my valley, but he did not stay long enough for me to find out which of theGraptashe was,—whether the question mark or the comma,Grapta interrogationisorGrapta comma. I should call him the comma, for his stop was of the shortest, if it were not that my doubt of his identity leaves me with the query.
The rush of his business was even greater than that ofPyrameis huntera,and with one flip of his crooked-edged wings he was out of sight.
Three other butterflies I saw during the day in the neighborhood of my sunny hollow. One, the mourning cloak,Vanessa antiopa, I always expect to see on warm days in the sunny brown woods of April, and am rarely disappointed. Another which took the air from the hillocked ground of the two-century-old cornfield I thought to beVanessa j-album, more familiarly known, perhaps, as the Compton tortoise. I would have been glad to know this surely, for this butterfly is rather rare here; but bless me, he went off over the hills at a rate that shamed the flipperty angle-wing. These dilly-dallying butterflies of the poet, indeed! They are the busiest creatures of the whole woodland.
Last of all was a little red chap that shot through the rich gold of the sunlight quitelike an agitated bullet, his motor doing its very prettiest with the muffler off and both propellers roaring. Orville Wright could not have caught him. It was but a brief glimpse that I got, but I took him for one of the skippers, perhaps the silver-spotted, which is common here, though I have never seen one so early before. He was burly, thick-necked, short-winged, which is characteristic of the hesperids.
I would be glad to know what these early butterflies find to eat. Certain flowers are now in bloom, but you never find a mourning cloak or a hunter, a question mark or a painted lady fluttering about them. The bees are in the willow blooms and the alder catkins after pollen. The maples are in bloom. You can find hepaticas and violets, chickweed, crocus, snowdrop, and, I dare say, dandelions in blossom, and almost every day some new shrubor shy herb sends perfumed invitation out on the messenger winds.
Yet I find April butterflies most partial to such sunny spots as the ancient cornfield, where pines and scrub oaks will give no hint of bloom for weeks to come, and only dry lichens seem to flourish on the twig and chip-encumbered earth. Here the dainty cladonias thrive, the brown-fruited lifting tiny cups to the sun, while the scarlet-crested help this and the fringed variety to make crisp, tiny, fairy gardens that will show you great beauty if you will put your nose to the earth as the butterfly does in looking at them.
Perhaps these earliest spring butterflies sip from brown cups or draw from frost-moistened scarlet crests some potent elixir which warms the cockles of their wee hearts during the frigid nights of our Massachusetts Aprils. I hope so. I nevercatch them sipping honey at this time from any of the recognized sources. Perhaps the full flow of sap which is fairly bursting the young limbs of all trees now leaks enough to give syrup for the tasting, and they are thus more fortunate than their brethren, who will come later and dance attendance on lilac and milkweed. Maple sugar is better than honey.
There will be blossoms enough for them in the little hollow by and by, though at first it looked so brown and sere. Little by little, after my initiation at the antennæ ofPyrameis huntera, I began to see them, a rosette of green under my elbow, perhaps, or a serrate tip farther on. All under the brown grass the green rosettes of biennials and perennials have waited all winter long for a time like this. Out of the cores of growth built with slow labor in the increasing chill of autumn they arenow sending new leaves, one after another in rapid succession, that top the brown grasses and begin to wreathe them with the tender green of spring.
There is joy in their very coloring as they stretch up to meet the enfolding warmth of the sun. Here an early buttercup waves a cleft and somewhat pinnate hand to me with jaunty assurance, though in the heart of its cluster is as yet no sign of the ascending stem that is to bear the glossy, yellow bloom aloft. Dandelion leaves shake their notched spears all about, proud that their buds are already visible, though still tucked down in the heart of the plant and showing no sign of yellow.
Here are the wee strawberry-like leaves of the cinquefoil, pale counterpart of the buttercup to which it looks up in gentle envy and admiration. The cinquefoil follows hard upon the heels of the violet, andalready its buds are eager to be up and open. The linear root leaves of aster and goldenrod sit snug and green, growing a bit, but in no hurry to appear above the brown vegetation of last year. Their watch comes late, and there is no reason for them to be stirring thus early. And so the growth of lush green leaves is pushing up all over the dooryard of the old-time settler getting ahead of the lazy wood grasses that have hardly begun to put out tiny spears that eventually will stab through the old fog and help the others to make a new tapestry carpet for the empty woodland spaces.
Loveliest of all these now, and, indeed, the most germane to the spot, is the mullein. All winter long it has sat serene and self-sufficient, under the snow, armor-encased in pellucid ice, or in the bare, bitter nights when the stars of heaven were onesolid coruscation of silver and the still cold bit very deep. Clad in kersey like the pioneer, its homespun clothing has defied the weather, holding the cold away from its thin leaf with all this padding of matted wool which makes the plant seem so rough and coarse. In the summer it will defy the fierce heat of the July sun with the same armor, sitting here with its feet in the burning sand and its tall spike tossing back the sunshine with a laugh from its golden efflorescence.
Like the pioneer, the mullein came from the Old World, well fitted to bear the rigors and defy the dangers of the New. Like him it took root, and its seed holds the land in the rough places, brave and beautiful, though rough-coated, tender at heart, and helpful always.
So, when the sun has gone over the western ridge and the north wind scoutshave again mustered courage to invade the place, I leave the little hollow to the wilderness that still enfolds dreams of the one-time occupant. In its sheltered nooks some of the day’s golden warmth will remain, even until the sun comes again. I cannot tell where my busy butterflies will spend the night, but if I were one of them I should flip back into the dooryard of the pioneer’s homestead and cuddle down in the great heart of one of those rosettes of mullein leaves, there to slumber, warm and serene, wrapped to the eyes in its blankets of soft wool.
AT nightfall the wind ceased, ashamed perhaps of its prolonged violence, and we felt the soft presence of April all about. Someone had suddenly wrapped the world in a protecting mantle of perfumed dreams.
Hitherto it had been struggling to realize spring, succeeding here and there indeed, but always against cold disfavor and sullen opposition. Now, in a breath almost, joys and relaxation had come to all out-door creatures, and the air itself was suffused with tears of relief that brimmed over and made little laughing patterings on bare twigs and brown grass. Till then we had had no green of spring. The woodland world had been pink, and amber, and full of soft yearning of colors in hope and promise; flowers had struggled bravely forth here and there, but they had smiled patiently on a land brown with pasture grass of last year.
Yet in a night the full warmth of April fondness and her tears of joy at being really home again changed all that. Under the patter of wee showers the wan grasses of last year laid weary heads upon the black earth beneath them and went to sleep, while up in their places sprang the lush green spears of this year, glinting back a million joyous facets to the next morning’s sun that thus seemed to sprinkle all things with gleam of jewels.
They came very softly at first in the black dusk, these April showers, growing out of the air so close to my cheek that their touch upon it was infinitely fine and soothing. Thus the dew touches the grasson still nights in summer. To be alone in the pasture on such a night is to become one with all the primal gentleness of the universe. I could feel the happiness of the pasture shrubs and perennial herbs and germinating annuals, growing now on the warm bosom of mother earth, tucked away beneath the perfumed robe of April night.
The night before the cold sky was blown miles high in the air by the rough winds, and the pasture people sighed and shrank and shivered. The night out of which April showers were to be born descended like a benediction, and swathed all humble things in caressing warmth that was tremulous with moisture and perfume.
With the rain came gentle woodland sprites; and while it played them a merry, ghostly tune, they worked in harmony. They pressed the wan brown grass lovingly down and patted the black earth over it till it went to sleep. They pulled lustily at germinating blades, and in their labor, there under the darkness, they painted out in a night the brown of last year with the verdant pigment of this. They hammered and pried at the tough, varnished outer husks of buds, and finally worked them open and began unfolding the soft yellow-green of the young leaves within.
Thus the tips of huckleberry twigs, which had given a soft shade of wine red to the pasture all winter long, lost this tint and bourgeoned into palest green, and the shadbush buds began to shake loose their racemes of bloom. The little people worked in squads, and showers played their merry tunes hither and yon as they labored.
All through the night the fresh smell of the open pores of earth met you everywhere, and moist air built upon this all other odors and carried them very far. An opened kitchen door in the distance let out not only a rainbow-edged blur of yellow light, but the smell of fresh-baked bread cooling on the table before being put away in the big stone crock in the pantry by some belated New England housewife.
With the lullaby roar of the distant brook came the odor of the willow blooms, and with a shift of wind the faint resinous perfume of the pine wood. The darkness which blots outlines from the sight leaves the location of things to the other senses which serve faithfully. Scent and sound are as apprehensive as sight. Often, walking in the darkness, one may feel faintly the obscure workings of a sense which is none of these, whereby he dodges a tree trunk or a fence corner which he feels is there, yet through none of the five ordinary senses. The darkness gives us antennæ.
The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow, ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient earth.
In the open pasture the tune changedagain. It was there a chirpy crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of their homes.
But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music. Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin, swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules ringing against their kindred water.
Every drop danced into the air again onstriking and in the mellow glow of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy, heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree frog.
As the pattering music of the April showers on the waiting land is a rune of the ancient earth, so the love song of the swamp tree frog dreams down the years to us all the way from the carboniferous age. When the coal measures were forests of tree ferns, and the first men paddled through steaming shallows in their shade, the swamp tree frog was a tree frog indeed, and sang his soothing song from their branches. Since then he has degenerated and has lost most of the adhesive power of the tiny disks on fingersand toes. He no longer clings readily to trees, and is but an awkward climber. So, too, the webbing between his toes has nearly vanished, and he is not a strong swimmer. He haunts the shallows of the swamps and the sunny pools on the margin of the deep cove.
Perhaps he knows that he is degenerate, and that his safety lies mainly in silence and obscurity, for he sings rarely, except in the first heyday of spring, when the air is full of soft mists and warmth that stirs the deep-lying memories of the carboniferous age. He is a beautiful fellow, hardly more than an inch long, often flesh-colored, and with coppery iris tints that should make the mouths of frog-eating creatures water. It is for desire of him I believe that the pickerel haunt the veriest shallows at this time of year, where you may see them of an evening with theirback fins sticking out like the latticed sails of a Chinese junk.
I do not believe there is anywhere to be heard a dreamier or more soothing lullaby than that sung by the swamp tree frogs of a misty April night to the tinkling accompaniment of showers pattering upon the dancing surface of the pond. It begins in a sigh, swells till it stirs a memory, and dies away in a dream of its own happiness.
All the warm, soothing night the swamp tree frogs sang, and the showers made music for the laboring sprites, and when the morning came it was to a world new clothed in all Easter finery. The raindrop sprites had beaten and relaid the pasture carpets that had been so brown with the dust of last year, and now they were so clean and had such a soft, green nap that it was a renewed pleasure to walk on them. Green, too, was the wear of many of thepasture shrubs, and the fripperies of the shadbush made the more sober ones turn heads to look at her again. Already she had creamed the sage green of her delicate gown with the white of opening buds, and the berry bushes and the wild cherry, the viburnums, and all the other early flowering shrubs felt a touch of their own coming joy in just looking at her.
Loveliest of all these pasture folk was the sweet gale. If you would know how beautiful just catkins can make a slender, modest creature you should hasten into the pasture now and take note of her. Until last night you would have passed her by without noting, so modest and reticent she is.
The other two members of her family have been for months more in evidence. The sweet fern keeps some of her last year’s leaves still, and as you pass tossesa bouquet of perfume to you that you may know she is by. The bayberry holds blue candles to the wind all winter, and the incense of them carries far. But the sweet gale is too modest and shy for such things. She just sits quiet and unobserved, and thinks holy thoughts, and because she does so it seems as if all the warmth and kindness of April sun and April showers touched her first.
The catkins of the sweet fern were still hard and varnished, and had not cracked a smile this morning after the night of April showers. Not a candle of the bayberry had melted or shown flame in all this softness and warmth, yet there stood the gentle sweet gale all aflame with soft amber and pale gold, a veritable burning bush of beauty. There is no perfume from these blossoms, so gently shy and self-contained is the plant. Both the bayberryand sweet fern will woo you from a distance with rich aroma, but only after the leaves have come, and then only if you bruise them, will you get a message from the shy heart of the sweet gale.
On such a morning it seems as if all the birds were here, flitting back and forth through the soft blue early mists and singing for pure joy in the soft air and gentle warmth. For the first time the robins sang as if they meant it, not in great numbers, though there are legions of them here, but enough so that you can easily forecast the power of the full chorus which will tune up a little later. Blackbirds and bluebirds caroled, and song sparrows fairly split their throats, and now and then a flicker would sit up on a top bough, clear his throat, throw out his chest and pipe up “Tucker-tucker-tucker-tucker-tucker,” then, abashed at the noise he had made,go off on tiptoe, very much ashamed, as well he might be.
Not a fox sparrow could I see; I think they went on the day before, but a kingfisher was flying from cove to cove, springing that cheerful cry of his, which sounds as if someone were rattling a stick on his slats. A meadow lark piped a clear whistle from the top of a pitch pine, then alternately fluttered and sailed down into the grass for an early bite. The chipping sparrow swelled his little gray throat and trilled a homely, contented note, and there was a clamor of blue jays as the hour grew late.
I find the blue jay a lazy chap. No early morning revelry is for him. Breakfast is a serious matter, not to be entered into lightly or with chattering. Later in the day he is apt to be noisy enough, though he never sings in public. The nearest he