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At first he could see nothing; then he saw a snake a blue racer writhing along the ground, while above it, making queer little noises of distress, hovered a brown wood-thrush. He stiffened. His flesh always crawled at the sight of a snake! Yet, leaning forward, he watched intently. The thrush, its body a blur of brown feathers, rose and fell in continuous attack. Then he saw the reason.
This ladder he at once pounced upon, and used as if he had practiced on one all his life. I shut the cage-door at the upper end to keep him out of his neighbor's house, while the owner, an American wood-thrush, stood upon the roof, looking ruefully at this appropriation of his private property. Upon reaching the closed door the traveler jumped across to another cage nearly a foot away.
From a shadowed tree further up the glen, a wood-thrush suddenly began its almost unrivalled song. The familiar melody, heard so often from his cottage-porch in the June twilight, awoke him to the bitter truth. His wife had then sat beside him, while his little ones played here and there among the trees and shrubbery. They would hear the same song to-day; he would never hear it again.
A wood-thrush sang, and he knew the song came from the bird of which little Mavis was the human counterpart. Woodpeckers were hammering and, when a crested cock of the woods took billowy flight across a blue ravine, he knew him for a big cousin of the little red-heads, just as Mavis was a little cousin of his.
A cool breath from the woods behind us brought the odor of roots and of black earth; up in the leaves and sunlight somewhere a wood-thrush was singing, and I saw in Grayson's face what I had not seen for a long time, and that was peace the peace of stubborn purpose. He did not come for me the next day, nor the next; but the next he did, earlier than usual.
It is in this mystical hour that you will hear the most celestial and entrancing of all bird-notes, the songs of the thrushes, the hermit, and the wood-thrush, and the veery. Sometimes, but not often, you will see the singers. I remember once, at the close of a beautiful day's fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just after sunset, into a little open space in an elbow of the stream.
For a long time the wounded girl lay apparently unconscious, her face white and quiet. Only when a wood-thrush called from the woods close by were her lids half raised, and as Clayton pushed the shutter open above her and lifted her gently, she opened her eyes with a grateful look and turned her face eagerly to the cool air. The dawn was breaking.
The emerald edges of these silent tarns are starred with dandelions which have strayed here, one scarce knows how, from their foreign home; the buck-bean perchance grows in the water, or the Rhodora fixes here one of its shy camping-places, or there are whole skies of lupine on the sloping banks; the catbird builds its nest beside us, the yellow-bird above, the wood-thrush sings late and the whippoorwill later, and sometimes the scarlet tanager and his golden-haired bride send a gleam of the tropics through these leafy aisles.
The nearness of anything so exquisitely perfect as Marjorie Schuyler, and the comparison it was bound to suggest, would have been a conscious ordeal for almost any other girl. But Patsy was oblivious of the comparison oblivious of the fact that she looked like a wood-thrush neighboring with a bird of paradise.
We told him they were pictures of the Concord Court and Town Houses, the Common and the Mill-dam; on hearing which he expressed some surprise and interest, but evidently was as unfamiliar with the centre of the village where he had lived for years as a deer or a wood-thrush would be. He walked through it often on his way to the cars, but was too shy or too rapt to know what was there."
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