y sweet, song
sparrows with a lift and a lilt and a carol, and in the swamps the
red-wings trilling jubilant.

Noon came, and we camped under the sunny lee of a ridge that was all
abloom with hepaticas--clumps of lavender and white and rosy-lilac. We
found a good spring, and a fallen log, and some dead hemlock tips to
start a fire, and soon we had a merry blaze. Then Jonathan dressed some
of the trout, while I found a black birch tree and cut forked sticks for
broilers. Any one who has not broiled fresh-caught trout outdoors on
birch forks--or spice bush will do almost as well--has yet to learn what
life holds for him. Chops are good, too, done in that way. We usually
carry them along when there is no prospect of fish, or, when we are sure
of our country, we take a tin cup and buy eggs at a farmhouse to boil.
But the balancing of the can requires a happy combination of stones
about the fire that the brief nooning of a day's tramp seldom affords,
and baking is still more uncertain. Bacon is good, but broiling the
little slices--and how they do shrink!--takes too long, while frying
entails a pan. Curiously enough, a pan, in addition to two fish baskets
and a landing-net, does not find favor in Jonathan's eyes.

After luncheon and a long, lazy rest on our log we went back to the
stream and loitered down its bank. Pussy-willows, their sleek silver
paws bursting into fat, caterpillary things, covered us with yellow
pollen powder as we brushed past them. Now and then we were arrested by
the sharp fragrance of the spice bush, whose little yellow blossoms had
escaped our notice. In the damp hollows the ground was carpeted with the
rich, mottled green leaves and tawny yellow bells of the adder's-tongue,
and the wet mud was sweet with the dainty, short-stemmed white violets.
On the dry, barren places were masses of saxifrage, bravely cheerful; on
the rocky slopes fragile anemones blew in the wind, and fluffy green
clumps of columbine lured us on to a vain search for an early blossom.

As the afternoon waned, and the wind freshened crisply, we guessed that
it was milking-time, and wandered up to a farmhouse where we persuaded
the farmer's wife to give us bread and cheese and warm new milk. We were
urged to "set inside," but preferred to take the great white pitcher of
milk out to the steps of the little back porch where we could hear the
insistent note of the little phoebe that was building under the eaves
of the woodshed. Our h