song, which he reserves for
some nymph whom he meets in the air. Mounting by easy flights to the
top of the tallest tree, he launches into the air with a sort of
suspended, hovering flight, like certain of the finches, and bursts
into a perfect ecstasy of song,--clear, ringing, copious, rivaling
the goldfinch's in vivacity, and the linnet's in melody. This strain
is one of the rarest bits of bird melody to be heard, and is
oftenest indulged in late in the afternoon or after sundown. Over
the woods, hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest
strain. In this song you instantly detect his relationship to the
water-wagtail,--erroneously called water-thrush,--whose song is
likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of
youthful joyousness 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 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, scraggy 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 the
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