.

When I came out on the veranda not a note was to be heard and not a bird
to be seen excepting a woodpecker, who bounded gayly up the trunk of a
maple, as if sunshine were not essential to happiness, and a
chipping-sparrow, who went about through the dripping grass with perfect
indifference to weather, squabbling with his fellow-chippies, and
picking up his breakfast as usual.

I seated myself in the big rocker, and turned toward the woods, a few
rods away. The rain, which had fallen heavily for hours, light and fine
now, drew a shimmering veil before the trees,--a veil like a Japanese
bead-hanging, which hides nothing, only the rain veil was more
diaphanous than anything fashioned by human hands. It did not conceal,
but enhanced the charm of everything behind it, lending a glamour that
turned the woods into enchanted land.

Before the house how the prospect was changed! The hills and Adirondack
woods in the distance were cut sharply off, and our little world stood
alone, closed in by heavy walls of mist.

My glass transported me to the edge of the side lawn, where I looked far
under the trees, and rejoiced in the joy of the woods in rain. The trees
were still, as if in ecstasy "too deep for smiling;" the ferns gently
waved and nodded. Every tiny leaf that had thrust its head up through
the mould, ambitious to be an ash or a maple or a fern, straightened
itself with fullness of fresh life. The woods were never so fascinating,
nor showed so plainly

"The immortal gladness of inanimate things."

A summer shower the birds, and we, have reason to expect, and even to
enjoy, but a downpour of several hours, a storm that lays the deep grass
flat, beats down branches, and turns every hollow into a lake, was more
than they had provided for, I fear. My heart went out to the dozens of
bobolink and song-sparrow babies buried under the matted grass, the
little tawny thrushes wandering around cold and comfortless on the
soaked ground in the woods, the warbler infants,--redstart and
chestnut-sided--that I knew were sitting humped up and miserable in some
watery place under the berry bushes, the young tanager only just out of
the nest, and the two cuckoo babies, thrust out of their home at the
untimely age of seven days, to shiver around on their weak blue legs.

My only comfort was in thinking of woodpecker little folk, the
yellow-bellied family whose loud and insistent baby cries we had
listened to for days, the downy and