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The crooked stems remain black as charcoal, too much burnt to recover, and in the centre a young birch scorched by the flames stands leafless. This barren birch, bare of foliage and apparently unattractive, is the favourite resort of yellow-hammers. Perching on a branch towards evening a yellow-hammer will often sit and sing by the hour together, as if preferring to be clear of leafy sprays.
He looked at his boots first, and hoped they would hold together; and then he looked at the sky, and hoped it would not rain. The sky was dim; all the light seemed to be upon the earth; a soft, vague sunlight floated over the bog. Now and again a yellow-hammer rose above the tufts of coarse grass and flew a little way.
He stopped to listen and said to himself, "Well now, that do remind me of old times!" "For you know," he went on, "it is a rare thing to hear a lark now. What's become of all the birds I used to see I don't know. I remember there was a very pretty bird at that time called the yellow-hammer a bird all a shining yellow, the prettiest of all the birds."
He may not have been "thinkin' of squirrels," and yet the rarest and most evasive of that species were always crossing his trail; he may not have been "huntin' honey," and yet a wild bees' nest in the hollow of an oak absolutely obtruded itself before him; he wasn't "bird-catchin'," and yet there was a yellow-hammer always within stone's throw.
I could hear no voices but those of the birds, small and great, the constant song sparrows, the clink of a yellow-hammer over in the woods, and the far conversation of some deliberate crows. I saw William Blackett's escaping sail already far from land, and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window as I passed by, watching for some one who never came.
Just now his song is scrappy, composed of phrases that follow no order and do not fit or harmonize, and is like a poor imitation of an inferior mocking-bird's song. Between the scraps of loud thrush-music I listen to catch the thin, somewhat reedy sound of a yellow-hammer singing in the middle of the adjoining grassy field.
Before his journey through the Vale of Wield Mark in any discussion would have been ready to argue the mistake of the Reformation: but now there was no longer room for argument. What formerly he thought now he knew. The song of the yellow-hammer was louder in the quickset hedge; the trees burned with a sharper green; the road urged his feet.
Ah! better twist and untwist the rings of little Leslie's fair hair, and dress and undress her as she had done her doll; better examine the shell cracked by the yellow-hammer, and count the spots on the broad, brown leaf of the plane, than perplex herself with so uncongenial a difficulty. But the difficulty pursued her nevertheless, and baffled and bewitched her as it has done wiser people.
The goldfinch voted for the fox that the yellow-hammer should not have it, and the yellow-hammer because the goldfinch should not succeed.
Fastened on sidewise, head downward, on one was a magnificent scarlet tanager, his body half concealed by folds of tulle, his fixed eye staring into vacancy. On another was the head and breast of a beautiful yellow-hammer; it was surmounted by the tall sweeping plumes of the egret, which this bird produces only at breeding time. Oh, how much joy and beauty the world had lost by that cruel deed!
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