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"Did any of you notice that there was a rude sort of table in the shack?" asked Paul, as they kept on moving forward, wondering if a third discovery might be made at any minute. "Well, now, that's a fact," replied Bobolink. "I did see that, but somehow didn't think it queer at the time, not enough to mention it, anyhow.
"Tell you what," said Bobolink, who had followed Paul when he left the tent, as had also the rest of the occupants, "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that awful explosion shook the shoulder of earth and rock down, that we saw hanging above the mouth of the Radway River where she leaves the lake."
He claimed that he simply had to have quiet. And there was no such thing, with Bobby Bobolink around. One odd thing marked Bobby Bobolink's flights. He never flew in a straight course, as old Mr. Crow did, but darted this way and that, crossing and turning and wheeling, until it seemed sometimes to onlookers that he was sure to skid into a tree and meet with an accident.
And there in the undergrowth he found Buddy Brown Thrasher, who was exactly the person he was looking for. "I've come over to tell you about an idea of mine," Mr. Meadowlark announced. "It's about Bobby Bobolink. You know he has come back to spend the summer here in Pleasant Valley. It seems to me he's in better voice than ever.
It is a hopeless kind of task, and, however faithfully the crank is turned, it is one that brings little reputation. There is a great deal of poetry about haying I mean for those not engaged in it. One likes to hear the whetting of the scythes on a fresh morning and the response of the noisy bobolink, who always sits upon the fence and superintends the cutting of the dew-laden grass.
This moralizing is inspired by the pessimism of disenchanted age; but on that beautiful morning of the long ago, naught occurred to me save the wedlock of earth and heaven: I was near to nature's heart, listening to the ecstatic songs of the robins, the orioles and sweetest of all the bobolink.
On one side I could look over to an impenetrable, somewhat swampy thicket, where song sparrows and indigo birds nested; on the other, past the picturesque old-fashioned arbor, half buried under vines and untrimmed trees, far down the pretty carriage-drive between young elms and flowering shrubs, where the bobolink had raised her brood, and the meadow lark had chanted his vesper hymn for us all through June.
The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
It's the wild man of Cedar Island!" gasped Bobolink, actually sitting up in his excitement. And Paul had already made certain of this fact as soon as his eyes fell upon the hairy face seen among the branches. The shudder that passed through his frame had nothing to do with fear.
"I know it is," remarked the scout master, nodding, "because I counted them before I called you. And they seemed to lift something heavy from the boat, which they carried away into the bushes here." "Whee! something heavy, eh?" burst out the impetuous Bobolink; "and they carried it between them, two and two; was it, Paul?"
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