ect is owing mainly, no doubt, to their rank vegetable growths,
their fruitful swamps, and their dark, sheltered retreats.

Their history is of an heroic cast. Ravished and torn by the tanner in
his thirst for bark, preyed upon by the lumberman, assaulted and beaten
back by the settler, still their spirit has never been broken, their
energies never paralyzed. Not many years ago a public highway passed
through them, but it was at no time a tolerable road; trees fell across
it, mud and limbs choked it up, till finally travellers took the hint
and went around; and now, walking along its deserted course, I see only
the footprints of coons, foxes, and squirrels.

Nature loves such woods, and places her own seal upon them. Here she
shows me what can be done with ferns and mosses and lichens. The soil is
marrowy and full of innumerable forests. Standing in these fragrant
aisles, I feel the strength of the vegetable kingdom and am awed by the
deep and inscrutable processes of life going on so silently about me.

No hostile forms with axe or spud now visit these solitudes. The cows
have half-hidden ways through them, and know where the best browsing is
to be had. In spring the farmer repairs to their bordering of maples to
make sugar; in July and August women and boys from all the country about
penetrate the old Barkpeeling for raspberries and blackberries; and I
know a youth who wonderingly follows their languid stream casting for
trout.

In like spirit, alert and buoyant, on this bright June morning go I also
to reap my harvest,--pursuing a sweet more delectable than sugar, fruit
more savory than berries, and game for another palate than that tickled
by trout.

June, of all the months, the student of ornithology can least afford to
lose. Most birds are nesting then, and in full song and plumage. And
what is a bird without its song? Do we not wait for the stranger to
speak? It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard its
voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human interest
to me. I have met the Gray-cheeked Thrush (_Turdus aliciae_) in the
woods, and held him in my hand; still I do not know him. The silence of
the Cedar-Bird throws a mystery about him which neither his good looks
nor his petty larcenies in cherry time can dispel. A bird's song
contains a clew to its life, and establishes a sympathy, an
understanding, between itself and the admiring listener.

I descend a steep hill, and a