omen and
boys from all the country about penetrate the old Barkpeelings for
raspberries and blackberries; and I know a youth who wonderingly
follows their languid stream casting for trout.

In like spirit, alert and buoyant, on this bright June morning go I
also to reap my harvest,--pursuing a sweet more delectable than
sugar, fruit more savory than berries, and game for another palate
than that tickled by trout.

June, of all the months, the student of ornithology can least afford
to lose. Most birds are nesting then, and in full song and plumage.
And what is a bird without its song? Do we not wait for the stranger
to speak? It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard
its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human
interest to me. I have met the gray-cheeked thrush in the woods, and
held him in my hand; still I do not know him. The silence of the
cedar-bird throws a mystery about him which neither his good looks
nor his petty larcenies in cherry time can dispel. A bird's song
contains a clew to its life, and establishes a sympathy, an
understanding, between itself and the listener.

I descend a steep hill, and approach the hemlocks through a large
sugar-bush. When twenty rods distant, I hear all along the line of
the forest the incessant warble of the red-eyed vireo, cheerful and
happy as the merry whistle of a schoolboy. He is one of our most
common and widely distributed birds. Approach any forest at any hour
of the day, in any kind of weather, from May to August, in any of
the Middle or Eastern districts, and the chances are that the first
note you hear will be his. Rain or shine, before noon or after, in
the deep forest or in the village grove,--when it is too hot for the
thrushes or too cold and windy for the warblers,--it is never out of
time or place for this little minstrel to indulge his cheerful
strain. In the deep wilds of the Adirondacks, where few birds are
seen and fewer heard, his note was almost constantly in my ear.
Always busy, making it a point never to suspend for one moment his
occupation to indulge his musical taste, his lay is that of industry
and contentment. There is nothing plaintive or especially musical in
his performance, but the sentiment expressed is eminently that of
cheerfulness. Indeed, the songs of most birds have some human
significance, which, I think, is the source of the delight we take
in them. The song of the bobolink to me expresses hilarit