ding the greatest
weights of memory, imagination, and visualization on the slenderest
cobwebs of sound, odor, and color.

But again my bees became but bees--great, jolly, busy yellow-and-black
fellows, who blundered about and squeezed into blossoms many sizes too
small for them. Cicadas tuned up, clearing their drum-heads,
tightening their keys, and at last rousing into the full swing of
their ecstatic theme. And my relaxed, uncritical mind at present
recorded no difference between the sound and that which was vibrated
from northern maples. The tamest bird about me was a big
yellow-breasted white-throated flycatcher, and I had seen this
Melancholy Tyrant, as his technical name describes him, in such
distant lands that he fitted into the picture without effort.

White butterflies flitted past, then a yellow one, and finally a real
Monarch. In my boy-land, smudgy specimens of this were pinned,
earnestly but asymetrically, in cigar-boxes, under the title of
_Danais archippus_. At present no reputable entomologist would think
of calling it other than _Anosia plexippus_, nor should I; but the
particular thrill which it gave to-day was that this self-same species
should wander along at this moment to mosaic into my boreal muse.

After a little time, with only the hum of the bees and the staccato
cicadas, a double deceit was perpetrated, one which my sentiment of
the moment seized upon and rejoiced in, but at which my mind had to
conceal a smile and turn its consciousness quickly elsewhere, to
prevent an obtrusive reality from dimming this last addition to the
picture. The gentle, unmistakable, velvet warble of a bluebird came
over the hillside, again and again; and so completely absorbed and
lulled was I by the gradual obsession of being in the midst of a
northern scene, that the sound caused not the slightest excitement,
even internally and mentally. But the sympathetic spirit who was
directing this geographic burlesque overplayed, and followed the soft
curve of audible wistfulness with an actual bluebird which looped
across the open space in front. The spell was broken for a moment, and
my subconscious autocrat thrust into realization the instantaneous
report--apparent bluebird call is the note of a small flycatcher and
the momentary vision was not even a mountain bluebird but a
red-breasted blue chatterer! So I shut my eyes very quickly and
listened to the soft calls, which alone would have deceived the
closest analyze