e, and had shamed our
wisest plans. At the house our arrival had been anticipated about this
time, and dinner was being put upon the table.

It was then five o'clock, so that we had been in the woods just
forty-eight hours; but if time is only phenomenal, as the philosophers
say, and life only in feeling, as the poets aver, we were some months,
if not years, older at that moment than we had been two days before.
Yet younger, too,--though this be a paradox,--for the birches had
infused into us some of their own suppleness and strength. 1869.

VII

THE BLUEBIRD

When Nature made the bluebird she wished to propitiate both the sky
and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and
the hue of the other on his breast, and ordained that his appearance
in the spring should denote that the strife and war between these two
elements was at an end. He is the peace-harbinger; in him the
celestial and terrestrial strike hands and are fast friends. He means
the furrow and he means the warmth; he means all the soft, wooing
influences of the spring on one hand, and the retreating footsteps of
winter on the other.

It is sure to be a bright March morning when you first hear his note;
and it is as if the milder influences up above had found a voice and
let a word fall upon your ear, so tender is it and so prophetic, a
hope tinged with a regret.

"Bermuda! Bermuda! Bermuda!" he seems to say, as if both invoking and
lamenting, and, behold! Bermuda follows close, though the little
pilgrim may only be repeating the tradition of his race, himself
having come only from Florida, the Carolinas, or even from Virginia,
where he has found his Bermuda on some broad sunny hillside thickly
studded with cedars and persimmon-trees.

In New York and in New England the sap starts up in the sugar maple
the very day the bluebird arrives, and sugar-making begins forthwith.
The bird is generally a mere disembodied voice; a rumor in the air for
tow of three days before it takes visible shape before you. The males
are the pioneers, and come several days in advance of the females. By
the time both are here and the pairs have begun to prospect for a
place to nest, sugar-making is over, the last vestige of snow has
disappeared, and the plow is brightening its mould-board in the new
furrow.

The bluebird enjoys the preeminence of being the first bit of color
that cheers our northern landscape. The other birds that arrive about
the sa