laughing water"?
Ah! if one were a poet!

Then the birds came. A cat-bird first, with witching low song, eying me
closely with that calm, dark eye of his, the while he poured it out from
a shrub,

"Like dripping water falling slow
Round mossy rooks, in music rare;"

a vireo, repeating over and over his few notes in tireless warble; high
up in the maple across the chasm, a sweet-voiced goldfinch singing his
soul away outside; and lastly, a robin, who broke the charm by a
peremptory demand to know my business in his private quarters. I rose
to leave him in possession. In rising I disturbed another resident, a
red squirrel, who ran out on a branch and delivered as vehement a piece
of mind as I ever heard, stamping his little feet and jerking his bushy
tail with every word, scolding all over, to the tip of his longest hair.

I left them in their green paradise. I went to my room. I sat down in my
rocker to consider.

Then the winds got up. Through the "bellows pipe," as they suggestively
call the head of the valley, there poured such a gale that the birds
could hardly hold on to their perches. All day long it tossed the
branches, tore off leaves, beat the birds, rattled the windows, and
filled the blue cover to our green bowl of a valley with clouds, even
half way down the sides of the mountains themselves. And at last they
began to weep, and I spent my twilight by an open window, wrapped in a
shawl, listening to the

"Unrivaled one, the hermit-thrush,
Solitary, singing in the west,"

and looking out upon the hills, where I still hoped to find my bluejay.

VII.

IN THE WOOD LOT.

"There's blue jays a-plenty up in the wood lot," said the farmer's boy,
hearing me lament my unsuccessful search for that wily bird. "There's
one pair makes an awful fuss every time I passes."

I immediately offered to accompany the youth on his next trip up the
mountain, where he was engaged in dragging down to our level, sunshine
and summer breezes, winter winds and pure mountain air, in the shape of
the bodies of trees, whose noble heads were laid low by the axes last
winter. One hundred and fifty cords of beauty, the slow work of
unnumbered years, brought down to "what base uses"! the most beautiful
of nature's productions degraded to the lowest service--to fry our bacon
and bake our pies!

The farmer did not look upon it exactly in that way; he called it
"cord-wood," and his oxen dragged it down day by day. The