of a
spruce. I started out in hot haste a dainty bit of bird life--the black
and yellow warbler. I listened to the delightsome song of the
field-sparrow. I heard the far-off drumming of the partridge. I walked
and climbed myself tired.

Then I sat down to wait. I made a nosegay of blue violets and sweetbrier
leaves; I regaled myself with wintergreens in memory of my childhood; I
wrote up my note-book; but never a blue feather did I see.

The next day, between showers, I tried the north, with a guide--a
visiting Massachusetts ornithologist--to show me a partridge nest with
the bird sitting. We followed the ups and downs of the road for a mile,
passing a meadow full of bobolinks,

"Bubbling rapturously, madly,"

climbed by a grass-grown wood road a mountain-side pasture, and reached
the forest. Under a dead spruce sat my lady, in a snug bed among the
fallen leaves. She was wet; her lovely mottled plumage was disarranged
and draggled, but her head was drawn down into her feathers in patient
endurance, the mother love triumphant over everything, even fear. We
stood within six feet of the shy creature; we discussed her courage in
the face of the human monsters we felt ourselves to be. Not a feather
fluttered, not an eyelid quivered; truly it was the perfect love that
casteth out fear.

My guide went on up to the top of Greylock; I turned back to pursue my
search.

Eastward was my next trip, down toward the brook that made a valley
between Greylock and Ragged Mountain. My path was under the edge of the
woods that fringed a mountain stream. Not the smallest of the debt we
owe the bonny brook is that it wears a deep gully, whose precipitous
sides are clothed with a thick growth of waving trees--beech, white and
black birches, maple, and chestnut--in refreshing and delightful
confusion. The stream babbled and murmured at my side as I walked slowly
down, peering in every bush for nests, and at last I parted the branches
like a curtain and stepped within. It was a cool green solitude, a
shrine, one of nature's most enchanting nooks, sacred to dreams and
birds and--woodchucks, one of which sat straight up and looked solemnly
at me out of his great brown eyes.

I sat on the low-growing limb of a tree, and was rocked by the wind
outside. I forgot my object. What did it matter that I should find my
bluejay? Was it worth while to go on? Was anything worth while, indeed,
except to dream and muse, lulled by the music of the "