"What is it?"

"You must show me the exact spot," he said, emphatically. "I shall have
a man out at once, to get it up, root and branch. It's the devil's
paintbrush."

"Then his majesty has good taste in color," I said.

"That stuff," he went on, "spreads like wildfire. It'll eat up my meadow
in a year."

I turned back and showed him the spot from which my flowers had come,
pointing out at the same time two or three other clumps I could see
farther out in the waving green sea, and before long his farmer and he
were very busy over them.

Now it appeared that in tramping about the deep grass, where we
bird-students dared not set our feet, he had nearly stepped on a
bobolink, who flew, and thus pointed out her nest; and he had taken its
bearings with the intention of putting us to shame.

We looked long at the tiny trio so compactly packed in their cradle,
till they awoke and demanded supplies. Then we carefully replanted the
dead stick, taking its exact bearings between three trees, drew a few
grass-stems together in a braid at the margin so that we should not lose
what we had so accidentally gained, and then we left them.

During this inspection of the nest, the "poet of the year" and his
spouse were perched on two neighboring trees, utterly unmoved by our
movements. They were, no doubt, so perfectly confident of the security
of the hiding-place that it never occurred to them even to look to see
what we three giants were doing. At least, such we judged were their
sentiments by the change in their manners somewhat later, when they
thought we were likely to make discoveries.

The meadow itself had been our delight for weeks. When we arrived, in
the beginning of June, it was covered with luxuriant clumps of blue
violets, and great bunches of blue-eyed grass that one might gather by
the handful at one picking. Later the higher parts were thickly
sprinkled with white where

"Gracefully as does the fawn,
Sweet Marguerites their dainty heads uphold,"

while the hollows were golden with buttercups. Then the grass under the
warm June sun stretched up inch by inch till it was three or four feet
high and very thick. Meanwhile a bobolink or two, and as many
meadow-larks had taken possession of it, and it was made still richer
by the sweet minor strains of the lark, and the song of the bird who,

"like the soul
Of the sweet season vocal in a bird,
Gurgles in ecstasy we know not what."

T