of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire in
the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of
green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full
translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--how these things and
others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal
month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at
each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two
syllables are like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the
phoebe-bird, or of the meadowlark. Its very snows are fertilizing, and
are called the poor man's manure.

Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors,--the
perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the
mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors
like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that
was to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to
the ear. It was almost transcendental. I walked across the hill with my
nose in the air taking it in. It lasted for two days. I imagined it came
from the willows of a distant swamp, whose catkins were affording the
bees their first pollen: or did it come from much farther,--from beyond
the horizon, the accumulated breath of innumerable farms and budding
forests? The main characteristic of these April odors is their uncloying
freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are
penetrating and lyrical. I know well the odors of May and June, of the
world of meadows and orchards bursting into bloom, but they are not so
ineffable and immaterial and so stimulating to the sense as the incense
of April.

The season of which I speak does not correspond with the April of the
almanac in all sections of our vast geography. It answers to March in
Virginia and Maryland, while in parts of New York and New England it
laps well over into May. It begins when the partridge drums, when the
hyla pipes, when the shad start up the rivers, when the grass greens in
the spring runs, and it ends when the leaves are unfolding and the last
snowflake dissolves in midair. It may be the first of May before the
first swallow appears, before the whip-poor-will is heard, before the
wood thrush sings; but it is April as long as there is snow upon the
mountains, no matter what the almanac may say. Our April is, in fact,
a kind of Alpine summer, f