y half in
possession.

Even Thoreau felt this attraction, and recorded in his Journal:
"I know of no more pleasing employment than to ride about the
country with a companion very early in the spring, looking at
farms with a view to purchasing, if not paying for them."

Blessed is the man who loves the soil!

XI

THE WOODCOCK'S EVENING HYMN

The twilight flight song of the woodcock is one of the most
curious and tantalizing yet interesting bird songs we have. I
fancy that the persons who hear and recognize it in the April or
May twilight are few and far between. I myself have heard it only
on three occasions--one season in late March, one season in
April, and the last time in the middle of May. It is a voice of
ecstatic song coming down from the upper air and through the mist
and the darkness--the spirit of the swamp and the marsh climbing
heavenward and pouring out its joy in a wild burst of lyric
melody; a haunter of the muck and a prober of the mud suddenly
transformed into a bird that soars and circles and warbles like a
lark hidden or half hidden in the depths of the twilight sky. The
passion of the spring has few more pleasing exemplars. The
madness of the season, the abandon of the mating instinct, is in
every move and note. Ordinarily the woodcock is a very dull,
stupid bird, with a look almost idiotic, and is seldom seen
except by the sportsman or the tramper along marshy brooks. But
for a brief season in his life he is an inspired creature, a
winged song that baffles the eye and thrills the ear from the
mystic regions of the upper air.

When I last heard it, I was with a companion, and our attention
was arrested, as we were skirting the edge of a sloping, rather
marshy, bowlder-strewn field, by the "zeep," "zeep," which the
bird utters on the ground, preliminary to its lark-like flight.
We paused and listened. The light of day was fast failing; a
faint murmur went up from the fields below us that defined itself
now and then in the good-night song of some bird. Now it was the
lullaby of the song sparrow or the swamp sparrow. Once the
tender, ringing, infantile voice of the bush sparrow stood out
vividly for a moment on that great background of silence. "Zeep,"
"zeep," came out of the dimness six or eight rods away. Presently
there was a faint, rapid whistling of wings, and my companion
said: "There, he is up." The ear could trace his flight, but not
the eye. In less than a minute the straining