Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_..!--the
most melodious sigh that ever issued from the clefts of a dungeon.

For color and form, brilliant singing, his very enemies, and the
bold nature he has never lost, I have long been most interested in
this bird. Every year several pairs make their appearance about
my place. This winter especially I have been feeding a pair; and
there should be finer music in the spring, and a lustier brood in
summer.

III

March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with
that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper
air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by
faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing
the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier
might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown
to him from the clouds. What far-off lands, streaked with mortal
dawn, does he believe in? In what soft sylvan water will he bury
his tired breast? Always when I hear his voice, often when not,
I too desire to be up and gone out of these earthly marshes where
hunts the darker Fowler--gone to some vast, pure, open sea, where,
one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I love and those who love
me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.

March is a month when the needle of my nature dips towards the
country. I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of winter
sleep, stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet
after goblet of young sunshine. I must find the dark green snowdrop,
and sometimes help to remove from her head, as she lifts it slowly
from her couch, the frosted nightcap, which the old Nurse would still
insist that she should wear. The pale green tips of daffodils are
a thing of beauty. There is the sun-struck brook of the field,
underneath the thin ice of which drops form and fall, form and
fall, like big round silvery eyes that grow bigger and brighter
with astonishment that you should laugh at them as they vanish. But
most I love to see Nature do her spring house-cleaning in Kentucky,
with the rain-clouds for her water-buckets and the winds for her
brooms. What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a
day! How she dashes pailful and pailful into every corner, till
the whole earth is as clean as a new floor! Another day she attacks
the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October,
and scat