and cypripedium gardens, osmunda
ferneries, and the lake lilies and pitcher-plants. A little before
sundown the day-breeze died away, and the lake, reflecting the wooded
hills like a mirror, was dimpled and dotted and streaked here and
there where fishes and turtles were poking out their heads and
muskrats were sculling themselves along with their flat tails making
glittering tracks. After lingering a while, dreamily recalling the
old, hard, half-happy days, and watching my favorite red-headed
woodpeckers pursuing moths like regular flycatchers, I swam out
through the rushes and up the middle of the lake to the north end and
back, gliding slowly, looking about me, enjoying the scenery as I
would in a saunter along the shore, and studying the habits of the
animals as they were explained and recorded on the smooth glassy
water.

[Illustration: CLOCK. THE STAR HAND RISING AND SETTING WITH THE SUN
ALL THE YEAR
Invented by the author in his boyhood]

On the way back, when I was within a hundred rods or so of the end of
my voyage, I noticed a peculiar plashing disturbance that could not, I
thought, be made by a jumping fish or any other inhabitant of the
lake; for instead of low regular out-circling ripples such as are made
by the popping up of a head, or like those raised by the quick splash
of a leaping fish, or diving loon or muskrat, a continuous struggle
was kept up for several minutes ere the outspreading, interfering
ring-waves began to die away. Swimming hastily to the spot to try to
discover what had happened, I found one of my woodpeckers floating
motionless with outspread wings. All was over. Had I been a minute or
two earlier, I might have saved him. He had glanced on the water I
suppose in pursuit of a moth, was unable to rise from it, and died
struggling, as I nearly did at this same spot. Like me he seemed to
have lost his mind in blind confusion and fear. The water was warm,
and had he kept still with his head a little above the surface, he
would sooner or later have been wafted ashore. The best aimed flights
of birds and man "gang aft agley," but this was the first case I had
witnessed of a bird losing its life by drowning.

Doubtless accidents to animals are far more common than is generally
known. I have seen quails killed by flying against our house when
suddenly startled. Some birds get entangled in hairs of their own
nests and die. Once I found a poor snipe in our meadow that was unable
to fly on a