g a glimpse of him. I formerly
saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and
probably still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an
hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch,
and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a
brook, oozing from under Brister's Hill, half a mile from my field.
The approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy
hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the
swamp.

There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading
white-pine, there was yet a clean, firm sward to sit on. I had dug out
the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a
pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost
every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. Thither, too, the
wood-cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot
above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at
last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round
me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken
wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who
would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single
file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the
young when I could not see the parent bird.

There, too, the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from
bough to bough of the soft white-pines over, my head; or the red
squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar
and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some
attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit
themselves to you by turns....

In the fall the loon (_Colymbus glacialis_) came, as usual, to moult
and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter
before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen
are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three,
with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come
rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one
loon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that,
for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come
up there.

But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling
the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though
his f