fire 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
meadow-lark. 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 mid-air. It may be the first of May before
the first swallow appears, before the whippoorwill 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, full of such contrasts and touches of
wild, delicate be