way, has come and gone again
in my time. The bank-swallows, wellnigh innumerable during my boyhood,
no longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the gravel-pit by the river.
The barn-swallows, which once swarmed in our barn, flashing through the
dusty sun-streak of the mow, have been gone these many years. My father
would lead me out to see them gather on the roof, and take counsel
before their yearly migration, as Mr. White used to see them at
Selborne. _Eheu fugaces!_ Thank fortune, the swift still glues his
nest, and rolls his distant thunders night and day in the wide-throated
chimneys, still sprinkles the evening air with his merry twittering. The
populous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows has wellnigh broken up, but still
a pair or two haunt the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their
ruined huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards, clearing their
throats with a hoarse hawk as they go, and, in cloudy weather. scarce
higher than the tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to
alight in one of our trees, though for what purpose I never could
divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me in the same way, perched
at high noon in a pine, springing their watchman's rattle when they
flitted away from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy
heads along as a man does a wheelbarrow.

Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country is
growing less wild. I once found a summer duck's nest within a quarter of
a mile of our house, but such a _trouvaille_ would be impossible now as
Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere taming of the neighborhood does not
quite satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe
in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the miry edge of
a spring within a few rods of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty
cows. There was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these
ordinarily shy birds were almost as indifferent to my passing as common
poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has become scientific, and
dignified itself as oology, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some
of our losses. But some old friends are constant. Wilson's thrush comes
every year to remind me of that most poetic or ornithologists. He flits
before me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A
pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched
entrance to the ice-house; always on the same brick, and never more than
a single