ow twittering from the sky above you, or the
first mellow drum of the grouse come up from the woods below or
from the ridge opposite. The bee is abroad in the air, finding
her first honey in the flower by your side and her first pollen
in the pussy-willows by the watercourses below you. The tender,
plaintive love-note of the chickadee is heard here and there in
the woods. He utters it while busy on the catkins of the poplars,
from which he seems to be extracting some kind of food. Hawks are
screaming high in the air above the woods; the plow is just
tasting the first earth in the rye or corn stubble (and it tastes
good). The earth looks good, it smells good, it is good. By the
creek in the woods you hear the first water-thrush--a short,
bright, ringing, hurried song. If you approach, the bird flies
swiftly up or down the creek, uttering an emphatic "chip, chip."

In wild, delicate beauty we have flowers that far surpass the
arbutus: the columbine, for instance, jetting out of a seam in a
gray ledge of rock, its many crimson and flame-colored flowers
shaking in the breeze; but it is mostly for the eye. The
spring-beauty, the painted trillium, the fringed polygala, the
showy lady's-slipper, are all more striking to look upon, but
they do not quite touch the heart; they lack the soul that
perfume suggests. Their charms do not abide with you as do those
of the arbutus.

II

These still, hazy, brooding mid-April mornings, when the farmer
first starts afield with his plow, when his boys gather the
buckets in the sugar-bush, when the high-hole calls long and loud
through the hazy distance, when the meadowlark sends up her
clear, silvery shaft of sound from the meadow, when the bush
sparrow trills in the orchard, when the soft maples look red
against the wood, or their fallen bloom flecks the drying mud in
the road,--such mornings are about the most exciting and
suggestive of the whole year. How good the fields look, how good
the freshly turned earth looks!--one could almost eat it as does
the horse;--the stable manure just being drawn out and scattered
looks good and smells good; every farmer's house and barn
looks inviting; the children on the way to school with their
dinner-pails in their hands--how they open a door into the past
for you! Sometimes they have sprays of arbutus in their
buttonholes, or bunches of hepatica. The partridge is drumming in
the woods, and the woodpeckers are drumming on dry limbs.

The day