te eggs spotted with brown.

"It is too good to be true," thought the girl. "I am asleep, and I shall
wake in a moment. I haven't done anything to deserve seeing this. Rose
is good enough; I wish she were here."

But the little brown bird was by this time in a perfect frenzy of
maternal alarm; and very reluctantly, with an apology to the angry
matron, Hildegarde let the ferns swing back into place, and pulled the
boat away from the bank. On the whole, it seemed the most beautiful
thing she had ever seen; but everything was so beautiful!

The girl's heart was very full of joy and thankfulness as she rowed
along. Life was so full, so wonderful, with new wonders, new beauties,
opening for her every day. "Let all that hath life praise the Lord!" she
murmured softly; and the very silence seemed to fill with love and
praise. Then her thoughts went back to the time, a little more than a
year ago, when she neither knew nor cared about any of these things;
when "the country" meant to her a summer watering-place, where one went
for two or three months, to wear the prettiest of light dresses, and to
ride and drive and walk on the beach. Her one idea of life was the life
of cities,--of _one_ city, New York. A country-girl, if she ever thought
of such a thing, meant simply an ignorant, coarse, common girl, who had
no advantages. No advantages! and she herself, all the time, did not
know one tree from another. She had been the cleverest girl in school,
and she could not tell a robin's note from a vireo's; as for the
wood-thrush, she had never heard of it. A flower to her meant a
hot-house rose; a bird was a bird; a butterfly was a butterfly. All
other insects, the whole winged host that fills the summer air with life
and sound, were included under two heads, "millers" and "bugs."

"No, not _quite_ so bad as that!" she cried aloud, laughing, though her
cheeks burned at her own thoughts. "I _did_ know bees and wasps, and I
_think_ I knew a dragon-fly when I saw him."

But for the rest, there seemed little to say in her defence. She was
just like Peter Bell, she thought; and she repeated Wordsworth's
lines,--

"A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

Here was this little brown bird, for example. Bird and song and eggs,
all together could not tell her its name. She drew from her pocket a
little brown leather note-book, and wrote in it, "Four white eggs,
sp