, the pretty pedestrian
mounts a limb a few feet from the ground, and gives me the benefit of
one of his musical performances, a sort of accelerating chant.
Commencing in a very low key, which makes him seem at a very uncertain
distance, he grows louder and louder, till his body quakes and his chant
runs into a shriek, ringing in my ears with a peculiar sharpness. This
lay may be represented thus: "Teacher teacher, teacher, teacher
teacher!"--the accent on the first syllable and each word uttered with
increased force and shrillness. No writer with whom I am acquainted
gives him credit for more musical ability than is displayed in this
strain. Yet in this the half is not told. He has a far rarer song, which
he reserves for some nymph whom he meets in the air. Mounting by easy
flights to the top of the tallest tree, he launches into the air with a
sort of suspended, hovering flight, like certain of the Finches, and
bursts into a perfect ecstasy of song,--clear, ringing, copious,
rivalling the Goldfinch's in vivacity, and the Linnet's in melody. This
strain is one of the rarest bits of bird-melody to be heard. Over the
woods, hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest strain. In
this song you instantly detect his relationship to the Water-Wagtail
(_Sciurus Noveboracensis_),--erroneously called Water-Thrush,--whose
song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of
youthful joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected
good-fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was
little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as
Thoreau by his mysterious Night-Warbler, which, by the way, I suspect
was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The
little bird himself seems disposed to keep the matter a secret, and
improves every opportunity to repeat before you his shrill, accelerating
lay, as if this were quite enough and all he laid claim to. Still, I
trust I am betraying no confidence in making the matter public here. I
think this is pre-eminently his love-song, as I hear it oftenest about
the mating season. I have caught half-suppressed bursts of it from two
birds chasing each other with fearful speed through the forest.

Turning to the left from the old road, I wander, over soft logs and gray
yielding _debris_, across the little trout brook, until I emerge in the
Barkpeeling,--pausing now and then on the way to admire a small,