ower,
more continuous notes from among the trees, it rose, a clear, pure,
wonderful soprano, lifting the whole wide chorus nearer heaven.

Farther along the creek, on the border of the swamp, the red-shouldered
blackbirds were massed; chiming in everywhere sang the catbirds,
white-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, orchard-orioles, and Maryland
yellowthroats; and at short intervals, soaring for a moment high over the
other voices, sounded the thrilling, throbbing notes of the cardinal,
broken suddenly and drowned by the roll of the flicker, the wild, weird
cry of the great-crested flycatcher, or the rapid, hay-rake rattle of the
belted kingfisher.

All at once a narrow breeze cut a swath through the mist just across my
bows, turned, spread, caught the severed cloud in which I was drifting,
and whirled it up and away. The head of the pond and the upper creek were
still shrouded, while around me only breaths of the white flecked the
water and the spatter-docks. The breeze had not stirred a ripple; the
current here in the broad of the pond was imperceptible; and I lay
becalmed on the edge of the open channel, among the rank leaves and golden
knobs of the docks.

A crowd of chimney-swallows gathered over the pond for a morning bath.
Half a hundred of them were wheeling, looping, and cutting about me in a
perfect maze of orbits, as if so many little black shuttles had borrowed
wings and gone crazy with freedom. They had come to wash--a very proper
thing to do, for there are few birds or beasts that need it more. It was
highly fitting for sooty little Tom, seeing he had to turn into something,
to become a Water Baby. And if these smaller, winged sweeps of our
American chimneys are contemplating a metamorphosis, it ought to be toward
a similar life of soaking.

They must have been particularly sooty this morning. One plunge apiece, so
far from sufficing, seemed hardly a beginning. They kept diving in over
and over, continuing so long that finally I grew curious to know how many
dips they were taking, and so, in order to count his dives, I singled one
out, after most of the flock had done and gone off to hawk. How many he
had taken before I marked him, and how many more he took after I lost him
among the other birds, I cannot say; but, standing up in the skiff, I
followed him around and around until he made his nineteenth splash,--in
less than half as many minutes,--when I got so groggy that his twentieth
splash I came near taki