usness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good
fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was
little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as
Thoreau by his mysterious night-warbler, which, by the way, I suspect
was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The
little bird himself seems disposed to keep the matter a secret, and
improves every opportunity to repeat before you his shrill,
accelerating lay, as if this were quite enough and all he laid claim
to. Still, I trust I am betraying no confidence in making the matter
public here. I think this is preeminently his love-song, as I hear it
oftenest about the mating season. I have caught half-suppressed bursts
of it from two males chasing each other with fearful speed through the
forest.

Turning to the left from the old road, I wander over soft logs and
gray yielding debris, across the little trout brook, until I emerge in
the overgrown Barkpeeling,--pausing now and then on the way to admire
a small, solitary now and then on the way to admire a small, solitary
white flower which rises above the moss, with radical, heart-shaped
leaves, and a blossom precisely like the liverwort except in color,
but which is not put down in my botany,--or to observe the ferns, of
which I count six varieties, some gigantic ones nearly shoulder-high.

At the foot of a rough, scraggly yellow birch, on a bank of club-moss,
so richly inlaid with partridge-berry and curious shining
leaves--with here and there in the bordering a spire of false
wintergreen strung with faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath of
a May orchard--that it looks too costly a couch for such an idler, I
recline to note what transpires. The sun is just past the meridian,
and the afternoon chorus is not yet in full tune. Most birds sing with
the greatest spirit and vivacity in the forenoon, though there are
occasional bursts later in the day in which nearly all voices join;
while it is not till the twilight that the full power and solemnity of
the thrush's hymn is felt.

My attention is soon arrested by a pair of hummingbirds, the
ruby-throated, disporting themselves in a low bush a few yards from
me. The female takes shelter amid the branches, and squeaks exultingly
as the male, circling above, dives down as if to dislodge her. Seeing
me, he drops like a feather on a slender twig, and in a moment both
are gone. Then as if by a preconcerted