like gala decorations to
fringe the way of Flora as she travels up the valley. The shad-trees have
blossomed rather late. In them and under them it is fully spring. There
is a sound of bees and a sense of sweetness which make us forget all the
cold days and think only of the glory of the coming summer. There comes a
song sparrow and perches on one of the twigs. He throws back his little
head, opens his mouth and pours forth a flood of melody. Next comes a
myrtle warbler, eager to show us the yellow on his crown, on his two
sides and the lower part of his back. He is one of the most abundant of
the warblers and one of the most charming and fearless. He perches on a
hop hornbeam tree from which the catkins have just shed their yellow
pollen and goes over it somewhat after the manner of a chickadee or a
nuthatch, showing us as he does so the white under his chin, the two
heavy black marks below that, the two white cross bars on his wings, and
his coat of slate color, striped and streaked with black. He goes over
every twig of the little tree and then flies off to another, first
pausing, however, to give his little call note "tschip, tschip" and then
his little song, "Tschip-tweeter-tweeter." A pair of kingfishers, showing
their blue wings and splendid crests, fly screaming down the creek. Their
nest is in a tunnel four feet in the clay banks on the opposite side.

Purple finches, a bit late in the season, are feeding on the seeds of the
big elm. The snows of late April and early May must have delayed their
journey northward. When the bird-designer made this bird he set out to
make a different kind of sparrow, but then had pity upon the amateur
ornithologist who finds the sparrows even now almost as difficult to
classify as the amateur botanists do their asters; so he dipped the bird
in some raspberry juice--John Burroughs says pokeberry juice--and the
finch came out of the dye with a wash of raspberry red on his head,
shoulders and upper breast, brightest on the head and the lower part of
his back. Otherwise he looks much like an English sparrow.

* * * * *

Now the belated April flowers are seen at their best, mingled with many
of the May arrivals. It is such a day as that when Bryant wrote "The Old
Man's Counsel." On the sloping hillsides, around the leafing hazel
"gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open places
the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and so