he lingers
Where shadows on clover heads fall;
And the wind with leaf-tipped fingers,
Is playing in concert with all."

ELIZA COOK.

Now grandpapa's house, Woodside, stood on the side of a wood; in fact
there was only a grassy road between the gates and the wood itself.

Such a wood! with large old elms and oaks and other trees. In the more
open spaces were trees and bushes of hawthorn, now completely covered
with white blossom, the pretty May-bloom. There too grew primroses,
violets, wild hyacinths, besides a long list of other wild flowers,
ferns, and feathery green moss.

One fine day grandmamma took the children herself across the road into
the wood. She sat down in one of the open spaces upon the trunk of a
fallen tree, while the children played at hide-and-seek among the bushes
or picked the wild flowers.

By-and-by they came back to grandmamma, who was reading while they were
playing about, and said, "Grandmamma, will you tell us about papa when
he was a little boy?"

Grandmamma took off her spectacles, shut her book, and the children sat
down quite close to her, on the grass at her feet.

Then she began:--"When your father and your uncle and aunts, were about
as old as you are now, they came with me into this very place one summer
day.

"After they had played awhile they came to me, and I said to them,
'Children, what do you hear?'

"'Hear, mother?' they said; 'why, nothing in particular. What _is_ there
to hear?'

"'Well,' I said, 'now all of you shut your eyes and listen, and don't
speak till I tell you.'

"After a short time I told them to open their eyes; and I asked John,
who was the eldest, what he had heard.

"'First of all I heard the birds singing, then I noticed that there were
different sorts of birds singing: I heard the blackbird, the thrush, the
little finches, and the warblers--I could not tell you how many; some of
them singing as if they could not make sound enough, and others sung a
low song, with twitterings and chatterings all to themselves. Some
seemed calling to birds a long way off; then I heard those other birds
answer, but the sound was so faint that I should not have heard it at
all if we had not been so still. I was trying to catch a faint sound of
a bird some distance down the wood, which sounded like the coo of the
wood-pigeon, when you said, "Open your eyes."'

"Then I turned to Harry--your father, children--and he said, 'Of course
I heard the birds, but I