ve not enthroned this thrush. Possibly, even, they do not
share human admiration for his song. The redstart goes on jerking out
his monotonous ditty; chippy irreverently mounts a perch and trills out
his inane apology for a song; the vireo in yonder tree spares us not
one of his never-ending platitudes. But the hermit thrush goes on with
sublime indifference to the voices of common folk down below. Sometimes
he is answered from afar by another of his kind, who arranges his notes
a little differently. The two seem to wait for each other, as if not to
mar their divine harmony by vulgar haste or confusion.

* * * * *

"We must find the 'see-here' bird," said my friend the next morning,
when she appeared at the door of the farmhouse, and I joined her for our
second tramp. This was a bird whose long, deliberate notes, sounding
like the above words, had tantalized me from the day of my arrival.

We resolved this time to go into the woods we had skirted the night
before. A set of bars admitted us to a most enticing bit of forest, a
paradise to city-weary eyes and nature-loving hearts. From the bars rose
sharply a rough wood road, while a few steps to the right and a scramble
up a rocky path changed the whole world in a moment. We were in a
perfect nook, which I had discovered a few days before, with a carpet of
dead leaves, a sky of waving branches, the fierce sun shut out by
curtains of living green, the air cooled by a clear mountain stream, and
the "priceless gift of delicious silence"--silence that had haunted my
dreams for months--broken only by the voices of birds, whispers of
leaves, and ripple of brook. In this spot,

"where Nature dwells alone,
Of man unknowing, and to man unknown,"

(as I tried to persuade myself) I had established my out-of-door study,
and here I had spent perfect days, watching the residents of the
vicinity, and saturating my whole being with the delights of sight and
sound and scent till it was thrilling happiness just to be alive. Would
that I could impart the freshness, the fragrance, the heavenly peace of
those days to this chronicle, to comfort and strengthen my readers not
so blessed as to share them!

The dwellers in this delectable spot, where I persuaded my friend to
rest a moment, I had not found altogether what I should have chosen;
for, unfortunately, the place most desirable for the student is not
always the best for birds. They are quite