ry Wood-thrush deaf to all their entreaties, and bent alone
on pursuing his solitary way. But as he wheeled slowly above their
heads, as he seemed just about to vanish into the blue distance, they
heard his faint voice--whether in terror or weakness they could not
tell--only the words fell distinctly on their ears,--

"_I see! I see! I see! The Red-coats are coming!_"

Faint and far and clarion-clear, it trembled through Leafland, low but
ominous. Mapleton heard it and wondered; Elmthorpe and Ashby and Nutham
repeated it, looking into one another's eyes for a meaning. Proud old
Oakwich tried to assume a grave aspect, but was inwardly at her wits'
end. "The Red-coats are coming." All the ancient men and women,
great-great-great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers, whose childhood
lay wellnigh lost in the infinite past of April days, said it over to
each other with thin, quavering voices; but all their experience gave
them no key to the mysterious message. Then the post-riders were brought
into requisition. The whole corporation of Gale, Breeze, Zephyr, & Co.,
Express Company, all their clerks, agents, and errand-boys, were sent to
and fro through the Commonwealth, to see if any one anywhere had a
little light to bestow upon the subject. Alas! the light came all too
soon, and brought infinite sighing and sobbing. A thought suddenly broke
loose in Oakwich, and up spake an old Oakwichian. "Oh! and oh! and woe
is me for my miserable land now, now about to be bereft of her children!
All her strength destroyed, all her loveliness laid desolate!"

Straightway throughout Leafland rose the voice of wailing, "Woe! woe!
woe! for the miserable land!" but none of them knew what they were
crying for; only the Oakwichian began it, and nothing better occurred to
them to do than to join in; which soon made the sunny day overcast, and
all the people walking in Netherworld where it approaches Leafland
wrapped their old cloaks about them, and said spitefully, "What a
disagreeable, raw east-wind it is, to be sure!"

But by and by, when their throats were quite dry and sore with wailing,
one of the Mapletonians, a very sensible young woman, quite famous
indeed for her wisdom, bethought herself to inquire what it was all
about. Then there was a very pretty outburst of indignation. For a
moment they forgot their grief, and, what was still worse, their good
manners, and turned upon the unfortunate young woman.

"And so you set yourself above