but a few moments and
then passes on as silently as a July zephyr. The halting voice of the
preacher, the red-eyed vireo, comes out of the thicket; then, from an
oak overhead, where a little twig is trembling, the softer voice of
the warbling vireo queries: "Can't you see it's best to sing and work
like me?", with the emphasis on the "me."

Blue-jays loiter down the old road, making short flights from tree to
tree, moving in the one plane and with slowly beating wings; only
rarely do they fold their wings and dip. Redheads and flickers, like
the other woodpeckers, have a slightly dipping flight. They open and
close their wings in quick succession, not slowly like the
goldfinches; consequently their dips are not so pronounced. The line
of their flight is a ripple rather than a billow.

Chickadee and his family come chattering through the pasture. They had
a felt-lined nest in a fence-post during the warm days of June; now
they find life easy and sweet--sweet as the two notes mingled with
their chatter. Upside down they cling to the swaying twigs, romping,
disheveled bird-children, full of fun and song-talk. It is nothing to
them that the cruel winds and deep snows of winter will be here all
too soon. Summer days are long and joyous, life stretches out before
them; why waste its hours with frets and fears about the future?
Another round of merry chatter and away they flit. Scarcely have they
gone until a blood-red streak shoots down from the elm tree to the
grass. It is the scarlet tanager. For the last half-hour his loud
notes, tied together in twos, have been ringing from an ash tree in
the pasture, near the spreading oak where the mother sat so closely
during June. Though the nesting season is over he will sing for some
weeks yet.

So they come and go through the happy golden hours; now the nasal
notes of the nuthatch or the "pleek" of a downy woodpecker in the
pasture, followed by the twittering tones of the chimney-swifts
zigzagging across the sea of blue above, like busy tugboats darting
from side to side of a harbor. Crows string over the woods close to
the tops of the trees, watching with piercing eyes for lone and
hapless fledglings. A cuckoo droops from a tall wild cherry tree on
one side of the road to a tangle of wild grape on the other; he peers
out and gives his rain-crow call. So is the warp of the summer woven
of bird-flight and threaded through with song.

* * * * *