fted up his
divine voice as if his privacy was undisturbed. I open his beak and
find the inside yellow as gold. I was prepared to find it inlaid
with pearls and diamonds, or to see an angel issue from it.

He is not much in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely
any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject
of our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their
figures or their songs. A writer in the "Atlantic"[1] gravely tells
us the wood thrush is sometimes called the hermit, and then, after
describing the song of the hermit with great beauty and correctness,
coolly ascribes it to the veery! The new Cyclopaedia, fresh from the
study of Audubon, says the hermit's song consists of a single
plaintive note, and that the veery's resembles that of the wood
thrush! The hermit thrush may be easily identified by his color; his
back being a clear olive-brown becoming rufous on his rump and tail.
A quill from his wing placed beside one from his tail on a dark
ground presents quite a marked contrast.

[Footnote 1: For December, 1858.]

I walk along the old road, and note the tracks in the thin layer of
mud. When do these creatures travel here? I have never yet chanced
to meet one. Here a partridge has set its foot; there, a woodcock;
here, a squirrel or mink; there, a skunk; there, a fox. What a
clear, nervous track reynard makes! how easy to distinguish it from
that of a little dog,--it is so sharply cut and defined! A dog's
track is coarse and clumsy beside it. There is as much wildness in
the track of an animal as in its voice. Is a deer's track like a
sheep's or a goat's? What winged-footed fleetness and agility may be
inferred from the sharp, braided track of the gray squirrel upon the
new snow! Ah! in nature is the best discipline. How wood-life
sharpens the senses, giving a new power to the eye, the ear, the
nose! And are not the rarest and most exquisite songsters
wood-birds?

Everywhere in these solitudes I am greeted with the pensive, almost
pathetic note of the wood pewee. The pewees are the true
flycatchers, and are easily identified. They are very characteristic
birds, have strong family traits and pugnacious dispositions. They
are the least attractive or elegant birds of our fields or forests.
Sharp-shouldered, big-headed, short-legged, of no particular color,
of little elegance in flight or movement, with a disagreeable flirt
of the tail, always quarreling with the