WOODLAND PATHS

                             THE WORKS OF

                           WINTHROP PACKARD

                            WOODLAND PATHS
                             WILD PASTURES
                            WOOD WANDERINGS
                             WILDWOOD WAYS

                _Each illustrated by Charles Copeland_

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                      SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
                        PUBLISHERS       BOSTON

     [Illustration: Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk

                              [_Page 33_]
                                   ]

                            WOODLAND PATHS

                                  BY
                           WINTHROP PACKARD

                            ILLUSTRATED BY

                           CHARLES COPELAND

                                BOSTON
                      SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
                              PUBLISHERS

                            COPYRIGHT, 1910

                     BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
                            (INCORPORATED)

                    _Entered at Stationers’ Hall._

                THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for
   permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally
                      contributed to its columns.

CONTENTS

                                                                    PAGE

SOUTH RAIN                                                             1

SPRING DAWN                                                           21

MARCH WINDS                                                           41

WOOD ROADS                                                            65

THE BROOK IN APRIL                                                    87

EXPLORATIONS                                                         109

EARLIEST BUTTERFLIES                                                 133

APRIL SHOWERS                                                        153

PROMISE OF MAY                                                       175

BOG BOGLES                                                           197

BOBBING FOR EELS                                                     219

THE VANISHING NIGHT HERONS                                           241

HARBINGERS OF SUMMER                                                 259

INDEX                                                                281

ILLUSTRATIONS

Six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk              _Frontispiece_

                                                           OPPOSITE PAGE

That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph
over the sudden death of a rabbit                                      4

He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from
fear, and goes whooping through the brush in
a frenzy                                                              44

There was a clamor of blue jays as the hour grew
late                                                                 168

The air was vivid with friendly staccato calls                       192

The wings arch in similar curves and lift him seemingly
a rod in air                                                         254

Her bill pointed skyward in the trustful, prayerful
attitude of all birds on the nest                                    278

SOUTH RAIN

The night was dark and bitter cold, though it was early March. Over in
the dismal depths of Pigeon Swamp, where no pigeons have nested for
nearly a half century though it is as wild and lone to-day as it was
when they flocked there by thousands, a deep-toned, lonely cry
resounded. It was like the fitful baying of a dog in the distance, only
that it was too wild and eerie for that. Then there was silence for a
space and an eldritch screech rang out.

It was blood-curdling to a human listener, but it was reassuring to the
great horned owl snuggling down on her two great blotched eggs to keep
them secure from the cold, for it was the voice of her mate hunting.
Sailing silently on bat-like wings he was beating the open spaces of the
wood, hoping to find a partridge at roost, and I fancy the deep “whoo;
hoo, hoo, hoo; whoo, whoo,” all on the same note, was a grumble that
trained dogs and pump-guns are making the game birds so scarce. Perhaps
that blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of
a rabbit, for _Bubo virginiana_ is tremendously rapacious and will eat
any living thing which he can carry away in his claws.

It might, too, have been his method of expressing ecstasy over the nest
and the promise of spring which the horned owl alone has the courage to
anticipate with nest-building in these raw and barren days, when winter
seemingly still has his grip firmly set on us. Oftentimes his

[Illustration: That blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the
sudden death of a rabbit]

housekeeping arrangements are completed by late February. No other bird
does that in Massachusetts, though farther north the Canada jay also
lays eggs about that time, way up near the Arctic Circle where the
thermometer registers zero or below and the snow is deep on the ground.

On what trees he cuts the notches of the passing days I do not know, but
surely the horned owl’s almanac is as reliable as the Old Farmer’s, and
he knows the nearness of the spring. I dare say the other birds which
winter with us know it too, though not being so big and husky they do
not venture to give hostages to the enemy quite so early in the season.
The barred owls will build in late March, and soon after April fool’s
day the woodcock will be stealing north and placing queer, pointed,
blotched eggs in some little hollow just above high water in the swamp.

The crows are cannier still. You will hardly find eggs in their nests
hereabouts before the fifteenth of April, and you will do well to
postpone your hunting till the twenty-fifth. Yet they all know, as well
as I do, when the spring is near, and I think I have the secret of the
message which has come to them. It is not the fact that a south wind has
blown, for this may happen at any time during the winter, but it is
something that reaches them on the wings of this same south wind.

This night on which the horned owl of Pigeon Swamp brooded her eggs so
carefully was lighted by the moon, but toward midnight a purple
blackness grew up all about the still sky and blotted out all things in
a velvety smear that sent even Bubo to perch beside his mate. There was
then no breath of wind. The faint air from the north that had brought
the deep chill had faltered and died, leaving its temperature behind it
over all the fields and forest. The air stung and the ground rang like
tempered steel beneath the foot, yet you had but to listen or breathe
deep to know what was coming. The stroke of twelve from the distant
steeple brought a resonance of romance along the clear miles and the air
left in your nostrils a quality that never winter air had a right to
hold. To one who knows the temper of the open field and the forest by
day and night the promise was unmistakable, though so subtle as to be
difficult to define.

Whether it was sound or smell or both I knew then that a south wind was
coming, bearing on its balmy breath those spicy, amorous odors of the
tropics that come to our frozen land only when spring is on the way. The
goddess scatters perfumes from her garments as she comes and the south
wind catches them and bears them to us in advance of her footsteps. You
may sniff these same odors of March far offshore along the West
Indies,--spicy, intoxicating scents, borne from the hearts of tropic
wild-flowers and floating off to sea on every breeze.

With them floats that wonderful grape-bloom tint that touches the
surface of all the waters to northward of these islands with its velvety
softness, the currents carrying it ever northward and eastward,
sometimes almost to the shores of the British Isles. You may see it all
about you in mid-ocean as your vessel steams from New York to Liverpool
or Southampton or Havre or the Hook of Holland. Some essence of all this
gets into the air on the southerly gales that are borne in the windward
islands and whirl up along our coast to die finally in Newfoundland or
Labrador or Greenland itself. I believe the horned owl knows it as well
as I do and begins his nest-building at the first sniff.

At daybreak the wind had begun to blow, all the keen chill was softened
out of the air, and blobs of rain blurred the southern window panes. The
temperature had risen already above freezing and was still on the upward
path. There was in all the atmosphere that rich, cool freshness that
comes with rain-clouds blown far over seas. It is the same quality which
we get in an east rain, but it had in it also that suggestion of
spiciness and that soft purple haze which drifts away from the tropic
islands that border the Caribbean. Stopping a moment in my study before
going out into this, I found another creature that had felt the faint
call of spring and answered it, I fear, too soon. This was a great
_Samia cecropia_ moth. The night before he had been safely tucked away
in his cocoon over my mantel, where I had hung it last December.

In the night he had answered the call and now was perched outside his
cell, gently expanding his wings with pulsing motions that seemed
tremulous with eagerness or delight. I noted the soft delicacy of the
coloring in his rich, fur-surfaced body and wings, shades which are reds
and grays and browns and ashes of roses, and a score of others so dainty
and delicate that we have no words to describe or define them.

A wonderful creature this to appear in a man’s house, sit poised on his
mantel and blink serenely at him, as if the man himself were the
intruder and the room the usual habitat of creatures out of fairy-land.
I studied him carefully, thinking, indeed, that he might vanish at any
moment, and then I went out into the woods in the soft south rain, only
to find that his colors that I thought so marvelous in the shadow of the
four walls of my room were reproduced in rich profusion all about me.

His velvety-white markings, lined and touched off with brown so deep in
places as to be either purple with density or black, were those of the
birch trunks all about me, and there were the rufous tints that shaded
down into pearl pinks and lavender all through the groups of distant
birch twigs. His gray fur was the softest and richest of the fur of the
gray squirrels, and this gray again shaded into red in spots that could
be matched only by the fur of the red squirrel. There were soft tans on
him of varying shades, from rich to delicate pale, and all the last
year’s leaves and grasses had them. Nor was there a color about him
which was not matched and repeated a thousand fold in bark and twigs and
lichens and shadows all through the wood.

I had but to stand by with the great moth in my mind’s eye to see the
whole woodland bursting from its cocoon and spreading its wings for
flight. As a matter of fact that is what it is going to do later--but
the time is not yet. Meanwhile the south rain was washing its colors
clear and laying bare their bright beauty. In it you saw without
question the promise of new growth and new life. Trees and shrubs stood
like school children with shining morning faces, newly washed for the
coming session. All trace of dinginess was gone. The yellow freckles on
the brown cheeks of the wild cherry gleamed from far; the pale, olive
green tint of the willow’s complexion was transparent in its new-found
brilliancy.

Looking down on the ruddy glow of healthy maple twigs, it seemed as if
they should have yellow hair and sunny blue eyes, so rich is the
coloring of these Saxons of the wood and so fresh it shone under the
ministering rain. Even the dour scrub oaks, surly Ethiopians, were not
so black as they have been painted all winter, but lost their ebon tint
in a hue of rich dark green that was a pleasing foil to the
cecropia-moth beauty of the rest of the woods.

The one color lacking was blue. The sky’s leaden gray was but a foil for
the rich woodland tints, and I wandered on seeking its hue elsewhere.
Over on the hillside are the hepaticas. Their color when open is hardly
blue, being more often purple or even lavender, yet they would do,
lacking a more pronounced shade. But I could not find a hepatica in
bloom as yet. Their tri-lobed leaves are still green and show but little
the wear and tear of the winter’s frosts and thaws. In the center of
each group is the pointed bud that encloses the furry blossoms, itself
as softly clad in protecting fur as the body of my moth visitor, but no
hint of color peeped from it as yet. You need to look carefully in very
early spring to be sure of this, too; for the hepatica is the shyest of
sweet young things, and when she first blooms it is with such modesty
that you have to chuck the flower-heads under the chin to get a glimpse
even of their eyes. Later on the coaxing sun reassures them and they
stare placidly and innocently up to it like wondering children.

Over on the sandy southern slope there might be violets, too. Later in
the year the whole field will be blue with them and all about are their
rosettes of sagittate leaves, which the cold has had to hold sternly in
check to keep them from growing the winter through. Indeed, I do not
believe it has fully succeeded. It has been a mild season, and I think
the violets have taken the opportunity during warm spells of several
days’ duration to surreptitiously put forth another leaf or so in the
very center of that rosette. If so, they might well have followed this
courage with the further audacity of buds, and buds, indeed, they had
but not one of them was open far enough to show even a faint hint of the
blue that I was seeking.

It was hardly to be expected of the violets. They are so sturdy and full
of simple, homely, common sense that it is rare that you find them
doing things out of the usual routine. Warm skies and south winds may
tease them long before they will respond by blooming earlier than their
wonted date. They know the ways of the world well and realize how unwise
it is for proper young people to overstep the bounds of strict
conventionality. On the other hand, the hepaticas, with all their
innocence, perhaps because of it, care little for the conventions.
Indeed, I doubt if they know there are such things, or if they have
heard of them would recognize them. It is likely that in some sunny,
sheltered nook some rash youngster, all clad in furs of pearl gray, is
in bloom now, though so shy and so hidden that I was unable to find the
hint of color. I have known them to half-open those lavender-blue eyes
under the protecting crust of winter snow.

Toward nightfall the rain ceased and the clouds simply faded out of a
pale sky, letting the sun shine through with gentle warmth. Whither the
mists went it was hard to tell, but they were gone, and a soft spring
sun began wiping the tears from all things. Under its caress it seemed
as if you could see the buds swell a little, and I am quite sure, though
I was not there to see, that at this moment the willow catkins down by
the brook slipped forth from their protecting brown sheaths and boldly
proclaimed the spring.

They might have done so, and I would not have seen had I been there, for
just then I had a message. “Cheerily we, cheerily we,” came a faint
voice out of the sky. An echo from distant angel choirs practicing
carols for Easter could not have seemed more musical or brought more
delight to me down at the bottom of the soft blue haze that was taking
golden radiance from the setting sun. Up through it I looked to the pale
blue of the sky and saw two motes dancing down the sunshine,--motes that
caroled and grew to glints of heavenly blue that fluttered down on an
ancient apple tree like bits of benediction.

Just a pair of bluebirds, of course, and I don’t know now whether they
are the first of the migrants to reach my part of the pasture or whether
they are the two that have wintered here and that I have seen before on
bright days. Wherever they came from they supplied the one bit of blue
that I had sought, and their presence was like an embodiment of joy.
Then the gentle prattling sweetness of their carol; what a range there
was between that and the wild voice of the great-horned owl, heard not
twenty-four hours before! It was all the vast range between Arctic
winter night and soft summer sunshine. The owl had voiced the savage
grumble of the winter, the bluebird caroled the gentle promise of the
spring.

The promise may be long in finding its fulfilment, of course. The snow
may lie deep and the frost nip the willow catkins,--though little
they’ll care for that,--and the bluebirds may be driven more than once
to the deep shelter of the cedar swamp, but that does not take away the
promise that came on the wings of the south wind,--the promise that set
the great horned owl to laying her eggs in that abandoned crow’s nest,
and that made the bluebirds seek the ancient apple tree as their very
first perch. March is no spring month, in spite of the “Old Farmer’s
Almanack.” It is just a blank page between the winter and the spring,
but if you scan it closely you will find on it written the promise we
all seek,--the hope that lured my great _Samia cecropia_ out of his snug
cocoon.

SPRING DAWN

I have been night-clerking a bit lately--social settlement work, you
know--at the Pasture Pines Hotel, paying especial attention to the crow
lodgers, and in so doing have come to the conclusion that in the last
score or so of years the crows in my town have changed their habits.

It used to be their custom to roost in flocks, winters. Over on the
Wheeler place in the big pines you could find a rookery of several
hundred of a winter evening, dropping in from all directions and making
a perfect uproar of crow talk, or rather crow yells, till darkness sent
them all to sleep, sitting together in long rows on the upper limbs, I
suppose for mutual warmth. Here, each with head poked deep under his
wing, they would remain till dawn, when with more uproar they would all
whirl off together to some common breakfasting place. Later in the day
they would become separated, only to drop in at night to the usual
roost.

It was not a very safe proceeding, for farm boys, eager to use that new
gun, used to go down before sunset and hide beneath the pines, letting
go both barrels with great slaughter after the crows had become settled.
Perhaps this had something to do with the breaking up of the custom, for
now, though many crows roost on the Wheeler place, they do so singly,
each in his own room, so to speak.

The same is true of the crow guests at the Pasture Pines Hotel. I had
the pleasure of waking them early there this morning, incidentally, and
vicariously, waking all crow-town. Last night, just as the last tint of
amber was fading from the sunset sky, letting a yellow-green evening
star come through, almost like a first daffodil, a crow slipped bat-wise
across the amber and dropped into a certain pine to roost.

I noted the tree, and this morning, before hardly a glimmer of dawn had
come, slipped along beneath the dark boughs, planning to get just
beneath his tree and see him first. But I had planned without the
obstructions in the path and the uncertain light. I approached unheard
on the needle-carpeted avenue beneath the big trees, but when I started
across the field, still twenty rods away from my bird, I kicked a dry,
broken branch.

“What? What’s that?” It was an unmistakable crow inquiry, fairly shouted
from the tree I had marked as the roosting place. There wasn’t the space
of a breath between the snap of that branch and the answer of the bird.
Surely a night-clerk in crow-town has an easy task. There need be no
prolonged hammering on the door of the guest who would be called early.
One tap is sufficient. I had hoped to stand beneath that tree and sight
my crow in the gray of dawn, see him yawn with that prodigious black
beak after he had withdrawn it from under his wing, then stretch one
wing and one leg, as birds do, look the world over, catch sight of me
and go off at a great pace, shouting a hasty warning to the world in
general.

But he did not need to see me. That breaking branch had opened his eyes
and ears with one snap. He heard the crisp of my footfall on the frozen
grass of the field and immediately there was a great flapping in the
marked pine tree and he was off over the tops of its neighbors to a safe
place an eighth of a mile away. He said three things, and so plain were
they that any listener could have understood them. Languages vary, but
emotions and the inflections they cause are the same in all creatures.
The veriest tyro in wood-lore could have understood that crow.

His first ejaculation was plainly surprise and query blended. In his
sleep he had heard a noise. He thought it, very likely, a fellow calling
to him to get up and start the day’s work. Then when the answer was a
man’s footfall he flew to safety, sounding the short, nervous yelp which
is always the danger signal. Then when he had again alighted in safety
he realized that it was morning again and he was awake and it was time
that the gang got together. “Hi-i, hi-i, hi-i-i,” it said. It was
neither musical nor polite, but it was intended to wake every crow
within a half-mile in a spirit of riotous good-fellowship. There was no
further need of my services; every crow within a half-mile answered that
call. Then I could hear those farther on rousing and taking up the cry,
and so it went on, no doubt indefinitely.

I have a feeling that I waked every crow in eastern Massachusetts a full
half-hour before his accustomed time, simply by kicking that dead limb.
However, I learned one thing, and hereby report it to the Lodging-House
Commission: that is, that the crows hereabouts have now given up the
dormitory idea and occupy individual rooms after nightfall. They were
scattered all through the pasture and woodland but no two were within
twenty rods of one another.

Their minds have not yet turned to nest-building and mating, though the
time is near, for they still flock in hilarious good-fellowship at
sunrise, and you may hear them whooping and hurrahing about in crowds
all day long. They may be beginning to “take notice”; I suspect some of
the hilarity is over that. But they have not come to the pairing-off
stage. When they reach that the flocks will disappear and you would
hardly think there was a crow left in the whole wood. You might by
stepping softly surprise a pair of them inspecting a likely pine in the
pasture, planning for the nest. You might, by listening in secluded
places, hear the curious, low-toned, prolonged croak, which is a
love-song. I have heard this described as musical, but it is not. It is
as if a barn-door hinge should try to sing “O Promise Me.” But there
will be no more congregations.

Certainly there was not much in the aspect of the night which was just
slipping away when I waked my crow that would seem to justify plans of
nest-building. The thermometer marked twenty in my sheltered front porch
when I stepped out. It must have been some degrees below that in the
open. The ground was flint with the frost in it. The old thick ice was
gone from the pond, indeed, broken up by the disintegrating insinuation
of the sun and the vigorous lashing of northwest gales, but in its place
was a skim of new ice formed that night. Standing still, you felt the
lance of the north wind still; it was winter. Yet you had but to
breathe deep to get the soft assurance of the near presence of spring,
and if you walked briskly for a moment the north wind’s lances fell
clattering to the icy ground and you moved in a new atmosphere of warmth
and geniality. Thus point to point are the picket lines of the
contending forces.

In the west the pale, cold moon, now a few days past the full, was
sinking in a blue-black sky that might have been that of the keenest
night in December. In the east, out of a low bank of dark clouds that
marked the dun spring mists rising from the sea twenty miles away,
flashed iris tints of dawn upward into a clear, pale sky that bore
dapplings of softest apple-green. On the one hand were night and the
winter, on the other dawn and the spring, and down the pine-sheltered
path I walked between the two to a point where I stopped in delight.
The pine path ended, and the willows let the spring dawn filter through
their delicate sprays. Just here I caught the hum of the water rolling
over the dam and the prattle of the brook below, and right through it
all, clear, mellow, and elated, came the voice of a song sparrow.

“Kolink, kolink, chee chee chee chee chee, tseep seedle, sweet, sweet,”
he sang and it fitted so well with the rollicking tinkle of the brook
that I knew he was down among the alders where he could smell the rich
spring odor of the purling water. The two sounds not only complemented
one another as do two parts in music, but they were of the same quality,
though so distinctly different. It was as if tenor and alto were being
sung.

I had gone forth expecting bluebirds; I had half hoped for a robin when
it came time for matins, for robins have been about all winter, and here
a song sparrow, no doubt the first spray from the northward surging wave
of migratory birds, was the first to break the winter stillness. He had
hardly piped his first round, though, before the voices of bluebirds
murmured in the air above, and two lighted on the willows, caroling in
that subdued manner which is the epitome of gentleness. I think these
two were migrants, for later in the morning I heard others.

Then in a half minute there was a shrilling of wings that beat the air
rapidly and six ducks swung over my head in the rosy dusk. Most ducks
make a swishing sound with the wings when in rapid flight, but this was
so marked a sibillation that I am quite sure it was a flock of
goldeneyes, more commonly called whistlers, because they so excel in
wing music. They swung a wide circle over my head and then dropped back
into the pond, where an opening in the young ice gave them opportunity.
Curiosity probably brought them up. They wanted to see what that was
prowling on the pond shore in the uncertain light,--a prompting that
might have cost them dear had I carried a gun, for they came within easy
range; then, having seen, they went back to their fishing. Their
presence added a touch of wildness to the scene that was not without its
charm, for you can hardly call the bluebird or the song sparrow wild
birds. They are almost as domestic as the garden shrubbery.

For the moment the bird songs and the whistling of the ducks’ wings
through the rosy morning light made me forget the grip of the winter
cold that was in all the air, yet when I had crossed the dam and begun
to clamber along the other shore of the pond the winter reasserted
itself. Here was no promise of changing season. The thick ice in its
disintegration had been pushed far ashore by the westerly gales, and
here it was frozen in pressure ridges which were not so far different
from those one may see on the Arctic shores. To them was cemented the
young ice of the night, and I could walk along shore in places on its
surface, its structure as elastic as that of early December.

Here, too, was piled high the débris not only of that great battle in
which the spring forces had ripped the thick ice from the water, but of
the daily skirmishes in which winter and north wind have set a half-inch
of ice all along the surface and spring sunshine has broken it away
from its moorings, obliging the very north wind that made it to pile it
in long windrows high on shore. To clamber along these pressure ridges
and hear the crunching cakes resound under my tread in hollow, frosty
tones, to feel the bite of the north wind which drifted across the new
ice, was to step out of the spring promise which the birds had given me,
back into the Arctic. I was almost ready to look for seal and wonder if
I wouldn’t soon hear the wild wolf-howl of Eskimo dogs and round a point
onto one of their snow-igloo villages.

The song sparrow was far out of hearing and here we were in mid-winter
again. Only in the east was there promise. Through the dark tracery of
pond-bordering trees I could see the sky all a soft, unearthly green,
like an impressionist lawn, and all through this the sun, now close
below the horizon, had forced into bloom red tulips and blue and yellow
crocuses of spring dawn. From the ice ridges it was all as unreal as if
it were hung in a frozen gallery, and I were an unwilling tourist
shivering as I observed it.

Again, I had to go but a short distance to find a new country. Here the
warmer waters of a little brook came babbling down the slope and had
pushed away all the ice ridges and warmed its own path far out into the
new ice. Along its edge the alder catkins hung in grouped tassels of
venetian red, and here and there a group had so thrilled to the warmth
of the running water that even in the face of the cold wind they had
begun to relax a bit and show cracks in the varnished surface that has
kept the stamens secure all winter.

It will not be long now before these favored ones will begin to shake
the yellow pollen from their curls. Already they are giving the hint of
it. A little way upstream, however, was a far more potent reminder of
the coming season. I caught a whiff of its fragrance and smiled before I
saw it.

I wonder why we always smile at this most beautiful spring flower,--for
it was a spring blossom, the very first of the season, which was growing
in the soft green of the brookside grass, its yellow head all swathed in
a maroon and green, striped and flecked, pointed hood, lifted bravely
above the protecting herbage into the nipping air. The flowering spadix
I could not see; only the handsome, protecting spathe which was wound
about the tender blooms to protect them from the cold. When the sun is
high in the sky this spathe will loosen a bit and let visiting insects
enter for the fertilization of the blossom. But in that cold air of
early morning it was wrapped tight.

I have seen orchids tenderly nurtured in conservatories that had not
half the honest beauty of this flower. Neither to me is the odor of the
derided skunk-cabbage more unpleasant than that of many a coddled and
admired garden bloom--a dahlia, for instance. Yet I smiled in derision
on catching the first whiff of it, and so do we all. If the
_symplocarpus_ cared it would be too bad, but it does not. Unconscious
of its caddish critics, it blooms serenely on in the swamps and takes
the tiny insects into its confidence and its hood, and adds a bit of
rich color to the place when no other blossom dares. And even as I
looked at it the sun slipped out of the low band of dark horizon-mists
and sent a golden good-morning like a benediction right down upon the
head of the humble, courageous, sturdy beauty of the brookside. After
that approval why should any blossom care?

MARCH WINDS

For two days the mad March winds have been blowing a fifty-mile gale,
setting all the woodland crazy. No wonder the March hare is mad. He
lives in Bedlam. No sooner does he squat comfortably in his form, his
fair fat belly with round apple-tree bark lined, topped off with wee
green sprigs of rash but succulent spring herbs from the brookside,
ready to contemplate nature with all the philosophy which such a
condition engenders, than the form rises in the air and its component
leaves skitter through the wood and over the hill out of sight, leaving
him denuded.

The usually dignified and gentle trees howl like beagles on his trail.
The protecting scrub oaks, gone mad, too, dab and flip at him till he
gets fidgety with thoughts of horned owls, and things rattle down out of
the sky as if he were being pelted with buckshot. All these matters get
on his nerves after a little, and if he sets his cotton-tail white flag
at half mast from fear and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy,
there is small blame to him. Even man, whose mental girth and weight are
supposed to be ballast sufficient against all buffetings, going forth on
such a day needs the buttons of his composure well sewed on or he will
find it ripped from him like the hare’s form and sent skittering down
the lea along with his hat, while he himself bolts here and there
fighting phantoms and objurgating the unseen.

Mad March winds are a good test of stability of soul. He who can stand
their weltings with serenity, can watch his

[Illustration: He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from
fear, and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy]

un-anchored personal belongings go mad with the March hare and still
thrid the sombre boskage of the wood with sunny thought and no venom
beneath his tongue, ought to be President. Even the New York papers
could not make him bring suit.

And after the two days of gale how sweet the serenity that came to the
thrashed and winnowed pastures and woodland. I fancy it all feeling like
a boy at school who, after being soundly flogged, gets back to the
soothing calm of his accustomed seat. There is a gentle joy about that
feeling that, as many of us know, has neither alloy nor equal. The whole
woodland, thus spanked and put away to cool, feels the winter of its
discontent vanishing behind it and has no room in its heart for aught
but the peace and joy of regeneration.

The gale began to fail during the second day and before midnight it was
dead; thus short-lived is frenzy. I do not know now if those last gentle
sighs were those of the wind in sorrow of its misdeeds, thus on its
death-bed repentant, or those of the trees, themselves given a chance to
sleep at last after a forty-hour fight for their lives. In the threshing
and winnowing of the woodland none but the physically fit may survive.
Oaks that have held their last year’s leaves lovingly on the twig had to
let them go like the veriest chaff, and all twigs and limbs that have
been weakened.

And as chaff and débris is thus pruned from the forest, so those trees
themselves that are not physically fit for the struggle for existence
are weeded out. The eye may not be able to pick these, but the gale
finds them. If the whelming pressure of its steady onrush is not
sufficient to bring them down, the racking of varying force and the
torsion of sudden changes in direction will snap the weakened trunk or
tear out the loosened roots. Then there is a groan and a crash, and
space for the younger growth to spread toward more light and air.

At no time of year is the weakness of roothold so liable to be fatal to
a tree as now. During the winter a gale may snap a tree off at the trunk
and smash it bodily to the ground. But if there is no weakness in the
trunk there can be none in the roots, for the frost that is set about
them holds even the shortest, as if embedded in stone. But now, when the
solvent ice has loosened the whole surface for a depth of a foot or
more, leaving it fluffy and disintegrated, those trees which have no
tap-roots and hold only in this lightened surface are in the greatest
danger of uprooting of the whole year. Farmers often clear a shrubby
pasture in late March or early April hereabout by taking advantage of
this fact. They make a trace-chain fast about the base of a pasture
cedar or a stout huckleberry bush, and with a word to the old horse the
shrub is dragged from the softened earth, root and all. In mid-summer,
after the ground has become compact, this is not to be done.

It is the spring house-cleaning time of the year, when nature is
sweeping and picking up, preparatory to laying new carpets and getting
new furnishings throughout, and if any of the old furniture of the
woodland is not able to stand the strain it has to go to the woodpile.
Without the mad March winds the forest would lose much of its fresh
virility, the old deadwood would cumber the new growth, and the mild
melancholy of decay would prevail as it does in some swamps where
sheltering surrounding hills and close growth shunt the gales.

Yet, though house-cleanings are no doubt necessary and beneficient, few
of us love them, and we hail with equal joy the resultant cleanliness
and the cessation of the uproar. The two days’ gale finally got all the
winds of the world piled up somewhere to the southward and ceased, and
the piled-up atmosphere drifted back over us, bringing mild blue haze
that was like smoke from the fires of summer floating far. All things
that had been taut and dense relaxed into dimples or softened into
tears. The frost went out of the plowed fields that morning, though the
sun was too blurred with the kindly blue mist to have any force. It was
just the general relaxation which did it.

Then is apt to come a halcyon day, and though the kingfisher is not here
to brood, nor will he be for a month, his fabled weather slips on in
advance to cheer us. It may not last a day. March is as mad as April is
fickle, and you will need to start early to be sure of it. Then, even if
you come home in a snowstorm, you will at least have had a brief glimpse
of that sunny softness which is dearer in March than in any other month.

This morning, in that calm which is most apt to settle on the land just
before sunrise, the whole woodland seemed to breathe freely and beam in
the soft air. The bluebirds caroled all about, and where a few days ago
one song sparrow surprised me with his song, a dozen jubilated in the
pasture bushes. A half-dozen blackbirds flew over, and though I could
not see a single red epaulet in the gray light, and listened in vain for
that melodious “kong-quer-ree” which no other bird can sing, I knew them
as well by their call of “chut-chuck,” which is equally characteristic.

A flock of goldfinches lighted in the pines with much twittering and
suggestions of the summer flight-note of “perchicoree.” But that is no
more than they have been doing all winter. In a moment, though, the
twittering changed. A melodious note began to come into it, and soon
several in the flock were singing rival songs as sweet, though I do not
think as loud, as those they will sing when June warmth sets the whole
bird world a-choiring. It was a happy note in the cool spring air, for
it was more than a spring song. The bluebirds and song sparrows voice
that, but the song of the goldfinch is a song of summer, and
irresistibly reminds one of fervid June heat and full-leaved trees. It
was a warming, winning chorus, and it brought the sun up over the
horizon, seemingly with a bound.

In all this joy of early matins I still miss one bird note that surely
ought to be heard by now, and that is the robin’s. Robins are here in
considerable numbers, but not one of them have I heard sing. I’m afraid
the robin is lazy, but, perhaps, it is just his honest, matter-of-fact
nature which does not believe in forcing the season. He will sing loud
and long enough by-and-by.

Such a spring morning is the best season of the year for moth hunting.
The moths are all sound asleep still, tucked away in their cocoons, that
are also tucked away in the woodland where it is not so easy to see them
in winter. Now the mad March winds have swept the last brown leaves
from the bushes, and such moths as hang up there for the winter sleep
are easily seen. You may take them home and hang them up wherever you
see fit, and you will then be on hand to greet the moth when at his
leisure he feels prompted to come forth from his snug sleeping-bag.

I always find more of the spice-bush silk-moth than any others,--perhaps
because we both love the same woodland spots, borders of the ponds and
streams where the benzoin and sassafras flourish, or upland pastures
where the wild cherry hangs out its white racemes in May. They dangle
freely in the wind, looking for all the world like a left-over leaf
rolled by accident into a rude cylinder. Yet the moth is safe and warm
within, rolled up in a silken coat that is firmly glued to the leaf;
and not only that, but extends in silky fabric all up along the petiole,
and firmly holds it to the twig itself. The mad winds which have scoured
the bush clean of all leaves and débris have had no strength which can
pluck this “last leaf upon the tree.”

If left to itself it will still hang there a year or two, perhaps more,
after the moth has emerged, gradually bleaching to a soft gray, but
still clinging. It is a splendid quality of silk, but no one has yet
succeeded in reeling or carding it. _Callosamia promethia_ thus escapes
becoming a product of the farm rather than the pasture. It is a fine
species to have hanging in winter cradles above your mantel, for the
_imago_ is large and beautiful, with deep browns and tans softly shading
into grays that are tinted with iris, the male being distinct with a
body color of deep brown less diversified than the coloring of his
mate.

The _Samia cecropia_ is another of our silk-worm moths whose cocoon is
not difficult to find. The _cecropia_, instead of rolling up in a
pendant leaf, constructs his cocoon without protection, and glues it
right side up beneath a stout twig or even a considerable limb. I have
one now that I took from the under side of a big leaning alder bole,
skiving it off with the bark, but most of those I have collected have
been attached to slender twigs of low shrubs.

But, though the _cecropia_ does not roll up in a leaf, he is apt to
place his winter home where dead leaves will persist about him. I have
never found him so plentiful as the _promethea_, though he is commonly
reported as numerous. Perhaps this habit of hiding among the dead
leaves has to do with this. He is our largest moth, and in beauty of
coloring is surpassed, to my mind, only by two others.

One of these is _Telia polyphemus_,--a wonderful creature, almost as
large as the _cecropia_, all a soft, rosy tan with fleckings of gray and
white and bands of soft violet-gray and pink, and great eyespots of
white margined with yellow, browed with peacock blue, and ringed with
violet-black. The larva, which is bigger than a big man’s thumb, is a
beautiful shade of transparent green with side slashings of silvery
white, and feeds on most of our deciduous forest trees.

I have had most luck in finding them on chestnuts. Last fall, when
beating a chestnut tree for the nuts, I dislodged several, one of which
I brought home and put in a cage with some leaves. He refused to eat,
but in a day or so spun a cocoon down in the corner of the box with a
chestnut leaf glued over him. No wonder we rarely see either moth,
caterpillar, or cocoon. The larva dwells in the higher trees, rolls
himself in leaves in the autumn, and spends the winter on the ground,
usually covered out of sight by the other leaves. Then the moth, wary
and swift, flies only by night.

The _Actias luna_, the beautiful, long-tailed, green luna moth, is, I
think, better known, for it has a way of flitting about woodland glades
in late June or July, before nightfall. But in the caterpillar or the
cocoon it is as hard to find as the _polyphemus_, and for similar
reasons. It, too, feeds upon walnut and hickory, and in the fall spins a
papery cocoon among the dried leaves on the ground.

The _luna_ moth is to me the highest type of moth beauty, and it is
worth a long search among leaves to find a cocoon of either this or the
_polyphemus_, and have the splendid privilege of seeing the lovely
inmate later emerge, spread its fairy-like wings, and soar away into the
soft spring twilight. It is as great a wonder as it would be to step
some mid-summer midnight into a fairy ring and, after having speech with
Mab and Titania and Puck and Ariel, see them flit daintily across the
face of the rising moon and vanish in the purple dusk. The world of the
_polyphemus_ and the _luna_, the _cecropia_ and the _promethea_, is as
far removed from ours and as full of strange romance as that.

Along the pond shore these mad March days one gets glimpses of another
world, too, that is, I dare say, as regardless of us as we are of that
of the moths. This morning in the dusk of young dawn the pond was like a
black mirror reflecting the shadows of the sky. But across it, near the
middle, was drawn a silver streak, the path of ducks swimming. Presently
I heard their voices,--the resonant quack of a black duck and the hoarse
“pra-a-p pr-a-a-p” of the drake. As they called, into the pond with a
splash came a small flock of divers, showing white as they whirled to
settle. The two species swam together, seemed to look each other over,
held who knows what conversations in their own way, then separated. It
is not for black duck and buffleheads to congregate, especially in the
spring; and while the black duck and drake swam sedately away, the
buffleheads began to hunt the small white perch which swim in schools
near the surface, making a splash as if a stone was thrown into the
water at every lightning-like dive.

Just as many a man here in Massachusetts lives his life and dies without
ever having seen or heard of a _polyphemus_ moth or a bufflehead, though
both may fly over his own head on many a dusky twilight, so the
migrating thousands of ducks each year fly over our cities and know
little of their uproar and bustle, nothing of their yearnings toward art
or theology, or of the inspiration of poets or the agony of the
down-trodden. Their world is all-important to them; ours is nothing, so
they escape our guns, which they vaguely feel will harm them.

Even we with our books, our laboratories, and our concerted research
into all things under heaven and in earth, do not get very far into the
lives of other creatures. I have said all the moths are still in their
cocoons. Perhaps they are, all but one, at least. That is a small brown
fellow that came flying across the brook in the chill air of a sunset a
night or two ago and now lies dead on my desk.

I caught him, for I wanted to know what moth dared come forth when the
ground was still frozen and no bud had yet burst. But I would better
have let him fly along to work out his own destiny, for in all the
moth-book there is no mention of this wee brown creature that dared the
frosty night with frail wings. I do not think he was an uncommon
specimen. Moths are so numerous that only the most characteristic
varieties of the more important species can be noticed in the
text-books.

On my way home I crossed a sunny glade among the pines, and here I met
an old friend, and had another example of the workings of other lives
whose wisdom or ability is beyond our ken. On the dark trunk of a pine
was sitting the spring’s first specimen, so far as my observation goes,
of butterfly life, an _Antiopa vanessa_, his mourning cloak so closely
folded that it made him invisible against the pine-tree bark. As I drew
near he flipped into the air and sailed by, beautiful in his tan-yellow
border with its spots of soft blue.

I say he was on the pine bark, but I did not see him there. For aught I
know, so well was he concealed, the tree opened and let him out, then
closed, that his hiding place might not be revealed. I would almost as
soon believe this as to believe, what lepidopterists assure me is true,
that this frail creature lives through the zero gales and deep snows of
five months of winter to come out in the first bright days of early
spring unharmed. It is as likely that a pine trunk would voluntarily
conceal him as that he could survive, frozen solid in some crevice in a
stone wall or hollow stump. At any rate, he is out again, along with the
hepaticas and song sparrows, and though the March winds and the March
hare may both go mad again, we have had moments when the spring was very
near.

WOOD ROADS

Some time in the night the tender gray spring mists that the hot
afternoon sun had coaxed up from all the meadowy places realized that
they were deserted, lost in the darkness. The young moon had gone
decorously to bed at nine o’clock, pulling certain cloud puffs of white
down over even the tip of her nose, that she might not be tempted to
come out and dance with these lovely pale creatures.

They were dancing then, but later they trembled together in fright, for
the kindly stars, their shining eyes grown tremulous with tender tears,
vanished too, withdrawn behind the black haze which the north wind sends
before it. A nimbus, wind-blown from distant mountain tops, was
spreading over the zenith, and through it the gentle spring mists heard
resound the crack of doom, the voice of the north wind itself, made up
of echoes of crashing ice floes out of Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic. Then
the spring mists fled to earth again, but had no strength left to enter
in. Instead, they lay there dead, covering all things a half-inch deep
with soft bodies of purest white, and we looked forth in the morning and
said that there had been a robin-snow.

It is a pity that those gentle, innocent gray-blue spring mists should
die, even to be lovely in death as they are, but it is their way of
getting back home. In the morning the repentant sun came and dissolved
the white, silent ones into gentle tears,--dayborn dew that slipped down
among the grass roots and laid moist cheeks close to daisy and violet
buds as they went by, and almost loved them into bloom. A few more
robin-snows and they will all be out. Very likely somewhere a dandelion,
some sturdy, rough-and-ready youngster, quivered into yellow florescence
at the caress. Robin-snows and the cajoling sun of the last week of
March often make summer enough for this honest, fearless flower.

Quite likely the tender joy of the mists at getting back safe to earth
under the caress of the eager sun, and their terror of the north wind,
which still rumbles by in the upper air, are both nascent on such days,
for you have but to go out to feel them, and they inevitably lead you
out of the raw mire of the highways, across the wind-swept pasture, into
wood roads.

These on such days have an atmosphere of their own. Here the thrill of
the sun is as potent as the push of the X-ray. It slips through clothes
and flesh, nor do bones stay it till it tingles in the marrow, a
vitalizing fire that is soothed and nourished by the soft essence of
those dead mists, now glowing upward from the moist humus. No wonder the
woodland things come to life and grow again at the touch! The north wind
may howl high above. Here under the trees the soft airs that breathe out
of Eden touch you and you know that just round the curve of the road is
the very gate itself.

My way to the most secret and withdrawn country of these wood roads
always leads me across Ponkapog brook at the spot where rest the ruins
of the old mill. It is three-quarters of a century or more since it
ground grist, and of its timbers scarcely a moss-grown remnant remains.
The gate to the old dam has been gone almost as long, but the waters do
not forget. Every year the spring floods bring down what driftwood the
pond banks can spare and bar their own course with it at this spot. The
water rises as high as of old, for a brief time.

It is as if the brook paid a memorial tribute thus yearly to the honest
labor of the pioneers, now long gone. For a time it lasts, then the
cementing bonds of dead leaves fail and the black flood roars through to
the sea. Come two months later and where its highest rim touched you
will find that it planted flowers in loving remembrance also, and
saxifrage and dwarf blue violet lean in fragrant affection over the
waters. I like to think that on Memorial day at least the stream makes
echo of the clank of the old-time mill-wheel in its liquid prattle, and
that the shuttle of reflected sunshine dancing back and forth is a
glorified ghost of the old wheels whirling once more in memory of the
miller and his neighbors.

Farther on I reach the pond shore, and on the narrow ridge which marks
the old-time high tide of winter ice pressure, a dry moraine always,
though running through marshy land, I strike what must be the oldest
trail in this part of the country. Here is a path which was traveled
before the time of the Norman conquest, or, for that matter, before
Cæsar led his victorious legions into Gaul. Here the first Indians trod
dry-footed when they went back and forth about the pond in their hunting
and fishing, for then, as now, it was a natural causeway.

To-day a stranger, seeking his way about the pond for the first time,
would not fail to find it, and the habitual wood-rover of the region,
old or young, knows its every turn. Upon this to-day, between the marsh
and the bog in the alluring spring sunshine, I found a whole bird
convention. Such an uproar! It was as if the suffragettes in one grand
concerted movement had swooped down upon Parliament by the air-ship
route, as the cable says they threaten, and were in the heat of
battering down its walls of deafness with racket and roaring, after the
fashion of the attempt on Jericho of old.

The blackbirds were in the greatest numbers and made the most noise
individually. There were a hundred of them, more or less, sitting about
in the trees and bushes, a few on the ground, and all of them practicing
every call or song that blackbird was ever known to make. All the harsh
croaking of frogs that as young birds they heard from the nest by the
bog they voiced in their calls; all the liquid melody of gentle brooks
tinkling over shallows, and the piping of winds in hollow marsh reeds,
they reproduced in their songs, and the whole was jumbled in this
uproarious medley. They even shamed a robin or two into singing,--the
first time I have heard these laggards do it this year, though they have
been here in force for some weeks.

There seemed to be no cause for this other than the joy of living. It
was just an impromptu concert in honor of the spring. I think I never
noticed before how vigorously the blackbird uses his tail at one of
these concerts. All the long black tails present worked up and down as
if each were a pump-handle working a bellows to supply wind for the
pipings. It reminded me of the church organ-loft, and the labors of the
boy when the choir is in full swing and the organist has everything
opened up and is dancing on the pedal notes to keep up.

Either side of this trail the wood should be a paradise for woodpeckers,
for the trees are here allowed to grow old without interference. In
birch and maple stubs the flickers have dug hole after hole, sometimes
all up and down a single trunk. The downy woodpeckers have been active
also and the chickadees have reared many a nestful of fluffy chicks in
the same neighborhood. Yet, with all the opportunity that the flickers
have had to bore in soft decaying wood for food or for shelter, I see
that they have also dug a round hole through the inch boards in the peak
of the old cranberry house. This, too, was probably for shelter, for
many flickers winter with us, and there would be room in the old
cranberry house-loft for a whole community, but I wonder sometimes if
there is not another reason.

Just as beavers and squirrels must gnaw to keep their teeth from growing
too long, so I sometimes think that woodpeckers need to hammer about so
much, whether for food or not, to keep their bills in good condition. It
is difficult to otherwise account for their continual practice. I knew a
flicker once who used to drum a half-hour at a time on a sheet-iron
ventilator on the roof of a building. I think he did it to keep his bill
properly calloused and his muscle up, so that when he did tackle a
shagbark tree with a fat, inch-long borer waiting in its heart-wood the
chips would fly.

This low pond-bank moraine with its immemorial trail leads all along the
north side of the pond, skirting the shoreward edge of the great bog
nicely. It takes you through the Talbot plains where tan-brown levels
stretch far to the northward, seeming to shrink suddenly back from the
overhanging bulk of Great Blue Hill, and it leads again into the tall
oak woods, where later the warbling vireos will swing in the topmost
branches and cheer the solemn arches with their gentle carols. By-and-by
the bog ends and the path marks the dividing line between the bulrushes,
marsh grass, bog-hobble wickets, and mingled débris of last summer’s
thorough wort, and joepye weed, and marsh St. John’s-wort on the one
hand, and the soft pinky grays of the wood on the other.

The climbing sun shines in here fervently, and the clear waters lap on
the sand and croon among the water weeds with all the semblance of
summer. No wonder the wild ducks linger long. The pond is full of
them,--black ducks and sheldrake,--quacking and whistling back and
forth, sometimes forty of them in the air at once, and taking no notice
of the wanderer on the bank. It seems to be their jubilee day as well as
that of the birds on shore.

Thus by way of the long trail teeming with spring life I reach the
enchanted country of the wood roads. Here are no pastures reclaimed, no
ancient cellar holes to show the path of the pioneer. Woodland it was
when the first Englishman came to Cape Cod; woodland it remains to-day.
Somewhere in its depths the barred owls are nesting, and I hear the
shrill pæan of a hawk as he harries the distant hillside. But for the
most part there is a gentle silence, a dignified quiet that befits the
solitude. It is the hush of the elder years dwelling in places somewhat
man-harried indeed, but never by man possessed. In this country to the
east of Ponkapog Pond lingered longest the moose and bear. The fox makes
it his home and his hunting-ground still; I find his trail still warm,
and in summer you should tread with care, for an occasional rattlesnake
trails his slow length among the rocks. The most that man has ever done
here is to shoot and chop trees. The echoes of axe and gun die away
soon, the trees grow up again, and man’s only mark is the wood roads.

Roads in this world are supposed to lead from somewhere to somewhere
else, but no suspicion of such definiteness of purpose can ever be
attached to wood roads, unless you are willing to say that they lead
from the land of humdrum to the country of romance. Sometimes, in
following them, you unexpectedly come out on the highway, but far more
often you have better luck, and the plain trail grows gently vague,
shimmers away to nothing, and you find yourself, perhaps, in a beech
grove, out of which is no path. You can hear the young trees titter at
your embarrassment, but you cannot find the path that led you among
them.

Perhaps in all your future wanderings you may not come upon that beech
grove again, for the wood roads wind and interlace and play strange
tricks on all outsiders. Particularly over in this region wood-lot
owners sometimes lose their wood-lots, and are able to get track of them
only after prolonged search, tumbling upon them then more by accident
than wit. Sometimes a wood road innocently leads you round a hill and
slyly slips you into itself again through a gap in the thicket. Thus,
before you know it, you may have gone around the hill any number of
times, as strangers get coursing in revolving doors in the entrances to
city buildings and continue to revolve until rescued.

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 whereby they 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, you may see cunning workmen making soil for the nourishment of
these forest trees. Here will be a round blot of yellow-gray lichen,
perhaps a _Parmelia 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 hardy cliff-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 BROOK IN APRIL

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 its pellucid 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 be nothing 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
the senses, 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 your hold 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 think about 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 Daphne northward. 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
leaves of 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 the spring. 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 of new 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 yellow of
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 shallow water. 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.

EXPLORATIONS

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. Often these 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 will come 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 pass
    Among the guests star-scattered on the grass,
    And in your blissful errand reach the spot
    Where 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 discoveries is 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 color of 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 come away 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 the _Usnea barbata_ trails 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. _Parmelias_ to north, _cetrarias_ and _stictas_ to
the south might well guide the wanderer, giving him the points of the
compass and leading him thus to his path again.

Under foot the _sphagnums_ build the bog and hold chief sway, but other
common varieties dispute the footing with them. Here is the _acutifolia_
with 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-like _squarrosum_ in
its loosely-crowded clusters of bluish green, and the robust
_cymbifolium_.

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 imaginable for 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,--the _mnium_.

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 the _mnium punctatum_ is 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 finding a new orchid hiding about the sources of
the Orinoco.

It was the _sphagnums_ that 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 the
_sphagnum_ and 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, I
thought, 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 were assembled 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 see them 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,--the _hyla_. 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 to the 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 this differs 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.

EARLIEST BUTTERFLIES

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 raids on 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 cellar wall 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
dreams dwell 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 passed before 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 you enter
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 many forms 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 coated all 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 rested motionless 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 the _Graptas_ he
was,--whether the question mark or the comma, _Grapta interrogationis_
or _Grapta 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 of _Pyrameis
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 be _Vanessa
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 quite like 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 shrub or 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 never catch 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 of _Pyrameis 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 are
now 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,
and already 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 one solid 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
scouts have 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.

APRIL SHOWERS

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 grass on 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 changed again. 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 on striking 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 fingers and 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 their back 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 the pasture 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 tosses a 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 bayberry and 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

[Illustration: There was a clamor of blue jays as the hour grew late]

ever comes to it is when, in a crowd of good fellows, he gives you an
imitation of some other bird, for the blue jay is a good deal of a
mimic. But it is always a burlesque, and it rarely gets beyond the first
few notes before a jeering chorus from his companions cuts it off, nor
do you ever know whether they are jeering at him or the bird he is
burlesquing. I fancy it does not matter to them as long as they have a
chance to jeer.

The crows are rather silent now, though occasionally there is a dreadful
towrow over a love affair which does not run smooth. Crows are such
canny Scotchmen of the woods that you would hardly expect them to throw
caution to the winds and have a riot and a duel with much loud talk over
a love affair, but it does happen. Among the pines a day or two ago I
heard a great screaming and scolding, cries of anger and distress, and
then, before I could reach the scene, silence.

When I got there all I saw was two crows slipping shamefacedly away
behind the tree tops. I thought it merely a lovers’ quarrel, but the
next day I found beneath the pines not far from the spot a handsome
young crow dandy, dead. It puzzled me a bit. He bore no marks of shot,
but seemingly had died by violence. He was a stout youngster and had
been in the prime of life and vigor. This morning, when all the soft
glamor of the spring seemed made for lovers, and many of the birds were
very happy about it, I heard another crow quarrel going on, and was mean
enough to spy on it.

There was a lady, very demure, and there were two lovers anything but
demure. Neither could get near enough to the lady to croak soft words of
love in her ear, for the other immediately flew at him in a rage. The
two tore about among the trees, hurling bad words at one another. It was
distinct profanity. They towered high in air and dove perilously one
after the other back into the woods again, screaming reckless oaths. Now
and then they came together, and one or the other yelled with pain. It
lasted but a few minutes, but it was a very hot scrimmage. Then one of
them evidently had enough, and abandoned the fight, taking refuge in a
thick fir very near me. No one of the three minded my presence.

The victor went back to his lady love on mincing wings, and though I
could not see them I knew that he was received with open favor, for the
cooing of cawing that followed was positively uncanny. As a reckless
freebooter, a wise and jovial latter-day Robin Hood of the woods, I
like the crow; but his love-making voice, dear me! One of Macbeth’s
witches might address the cauldron in the same tone. Evidently the
discomfited rival thought so too, for he began to jaw in an undertone
and flew grumbling away, mostly on one wing. I have no direct evidence,
of course, but I think my dead crow came to his untimely end in one of
these duels between rival lovers.

I was glad to leave the crows behind me for once, and then in the full
sunshine of the later morning I chanced upon a tree full of goldfinches.
It was a tree full, also, of most delightful music. Each bird was vying
with the other in a spring song that was more in tune with the
surroundings than any ever written by Bach or Schumann, a pure outgiving
of blossoming delight.

The birds themselves have just come into new bloom. Like the sweet gale
they seem to have put on new color of gold almost in a night, for they
made yellow gleams that were like blossoms all about on the bare twigs,
their black wings making the color more vivid by contrast. Yesterday it
was, or was it the day before, that these lovely singers were going
about in sober brown, like sparrows. Now suddenly they are splashes of
tropic sunshine.

It is their mating plumage which they will wear until late August puts
them in brown again. They are so happy about it, and their rich,
variable songs are such a delight that I am glad they do not quit wooing
and go to nest-building until late June, the latest, I think, of all our
birds.

And while I listened to the goldfinches a tiny bit of the sky fell. It
lighted on a leaf by me, and expanded its wings and enjoyed the full
sun. It was one of the least of butterflies and one of the loveliest,
the common blue, the winter form, so called because it comes thus in
April from a chrysalid that has passed the rigors of winter
successfully. Like the blossoming sweet gale the song of the swamp tree
frog and the gold of the goldfinch’s plumage this tiny, fearless bit of
blue is a seal of the actual soft presence of the spring, which comes
only when the April showers have made her calling and election sure.

To be sure, we might have a whiff of snow yet, but it will be only the
dust blown far from the fleeing feet of those winter ghosts now scuffing
the tundra up where the Saskatchewan empties into Hudson’s Bay.

PROMISE OF MAY

The first touch of the rose-gray morning air brought to my senses
suspicion of two new delights; one, the more sensuously pleasing, to be
sought, the other to be hoped for. It was easy to hope for things of
such a morning, for there come gracious days in the very passing of