Chapter V: Part 5

For the present, nevertheless, the birds are all in high spirits, warbling, twittering, feeding, chasing each other playfully about, as if life were nothing but holiday. Little they know of the future. And almost as little know we. Blessed ignorance! It gives us all, birds and men alike, many a good hour. If my playmate of long ago had foreseen that he was to die at twenty, he would never have been the happy boy that I remember. Those few bright years he had, though he had no more. So much was saved from the wreck.

Thoughts of this kind come to me as I recall an exhilarating half-hour of our recent stay in Franconia. It was on the first morning, immediately after breakfast. We were barely out of the hotel yard before we turned into a bit of larch and alder swamp by the shore of Gale River. We could do nothing else. The air was full of chirps and twitters, while the swaying, feathery tops of the larches were alive with flocks of whispering waxwings, the greater part of them birds of the present year, still wearing the stripes which in the case of so many species are marks of juvenility. If individual animals still pass through a development answering to that which the race as a whole has undergone--if young animals, in other words, resemble their remote ancestors--then the evolution of birds’ plumage must have gone pretty steadily in the direction of plainness. Robins, we must believe, once had spotted breasts, as most of their more immediate relatives have to this day, and chipping sparrows and white-throats were streaked like our present song sparrows and baywings. If the world lasts long enough (who knows?) all birds may become monochromatic. Wing-bars and all such convenient marks of distinction will have vanished. Then, surely, amateurish ornithologists will have their hands full to name all the birds without a gun. Then if, by any miraculous chance, a copy of some nineteenth century manual of ornithology shall be discovered, and some great linguist shall succeed in translating it, what a book of riddles it will prove! Savants will form theories without number concerning it, settling down, perhaps, after a thousand years of controversy, upon the belief that the author of the ancient work was a man afflicted with color blindness. If not, how came he to describe the scarlet tanager as having black wings and tail, and the brown thrasher a streaked breast?

These are afterthoughts. At the moment we were busy, eyes and ears, taking a census of the swamp. Besides the waxwings, which were much the most numerous, as well as the most in sight--“tree-toppers,” one of my word-making friends calls them--there were robins, song sparrows, white-throats, field sparrows, goldfinches, myrtle warblers, a Maryland yellow-throat, a black-throated green, a Nashville warbler, a Philadelphia vireo, two or three solitary vireos, one or more catbirds, as many olive-backed thrushes, a white-breasted nuthatch, and a sapsucker. Others, in all likelihood, escaped us.

In and out among the bushes we made our way, one calling to the other softly at each new development.

“What was that?” said I. “Wasn’t that a bobolink?”

“It sounded like it,” answered the other listener.

“But it can’t be. Hark!”

The quick, musical drop of sound--a “stillicidious” note, my friend called it--was heard again. No; it was not from the sky, as we had thought at first, but from a thicket of alders just behind us. Then we recognized it, and laughed at ourselves. It was the staccato whistle of an olive-backed thrush, a sweet familiarity, over which I should have supposed it impossible for either of us to be puzzled.

The star of the flock, as some readers will not need to be told, having marked the unexpected name in the foregoing list, was the Philadelphia vireo. What a bright minute it is in a man’s vacation when such a stranger suddenly hops upon a branch before his eyes! He feels almost like quoting Keats. “Then felt I,” he might say, not with full seriousness, perhaps,--

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.”

Yet how unconcerned the bird seems! To him it is all one. He knows nothing of his spectator’s emotions. Rarity? What is that? He has been among birds of his own kind ever since he came out of the egg. Sedately he moves from twig to twig, thinking only of another insect. This minute is to him no better than any other. And the man’s nerves are tingling with excitement.

“You will hardly believe me,” said my companion, who had hastened forward to look at the stranger, “but this is the second one I have ever seen.”

But why should I not believe him? It was only my third one. Philadelphia vireos do not feed in every bush. Be it added, however, that I saw another before the week was out.

There were many more birds here now than I had found six or seven weeks before; but there was much less music. In early August hermit thrushes sang in sundry places and at all hours; now a faint _chuck_ was the most that we heard from them, and that but once. And still our September vacation was far from being a silent one. Song sparrows, vesper sparrows, white-throats, goldfinches, robins, solitary vireos, chickadees (whose whistle is among the sweetest of wild music, I being judge), phœbes, and a catbird, all these sang more or less frequently, and more or less well, though all except the goldfinches and the chickadees were noticeably out of voice. Once a grouse drummed, and once a flicker called _hi, hi_, just as in springtime; and every warm day set the hylas peeping. Once, too, a ruby-crowned kinglet sang for us with all freedom, and once a gold-crest. The latter’s song is a very indifferent performance, hardly to be called musical in any proper sense of the word; nothing but his ordinary _zee-zee-zee_, with a hurried, jumbled, ineffective coda; yet it suggests, and indeed is much like, a certain few notes of the ruby-crown’s universally admired tune. The two songs are evidently of a common origin, though the ruby-crown’s is so immeasurably superior that one of my friends seemed almost offended with me, not long ago, when I asked him to notice the resemblance between the two. None the less, the resemblance is real. The homeliest man may bear a family likeness to his handsome brother, though it may show itself only at times, and chance acquaintances may easily be unaware of its existence.

The breeziest voice of the week was a pileated woodpecker’s--a flicker’s resonant _hi, hi_, in a fuller and clearer tone; and one of the most welcome voices was that of an olive-backed thrush. We were strolling past a roadside tangle of shrubbery when some unseen bird close by us began to warble confusedly (I was going to say autumnally, this kind of formless improvisation being so characteristic of the autumnal season), in a barely audible voice. My first thought was of a song sparrow; but that could hardly be, and I looked at my companion to see what he would suggest. He was in doubt also. Then, all at once, in the midst of the vocal jumble, our ears caught a familiar strain. “Yes, yes,” said I, “a Swainson thrush,” and I fell to whistling the tune softly for the benefit of the performer, whom I fancied, rightly or wrongly, to be a youngster at his practice. Young or old, the echo seemed not to put him out, and we stood still again to enjoy the lesson; disconnected, unrelated notes, and then, of a sudden, the regular Swainson measure. I had not heard it before since the May migration.

Every bird season has peculiarities of its own, in Franconia as elsewhere. This fall, for example, there were no crossbills, even at Lonesome Lake, where we have commonly found both species. White-crowned sparrows were rare; perhaps we were a little too early for the main flight. We saw one bird on September 23, and two on the 26th. Another noticeable thing was a surprising scarcity of red-bellied nuthatches. We spoke often of the great contrast in this respect between the present season and that of three years ago. Then all the woods, both here and at Moosilauke, fairly swarmed with these birds, till it seemed as if all the Canadian nuthatches of North America were holding a White Mountain congress. The air was full of their nasal calls. Now we could travel all day without hearing so much as a syllable. The tide, for some reason, had set in another direction, and Franconia was so much the poorer.

AMERICAN SKYLARKS

“Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,
To read what manner musicke that mote bee.”

SPENSER.

On the second day after our arrival in Franconia[11] we were following a dry, sandy stretch of valley road--on one of our favorite rounds--when a bird flew across it, just before us, and dropped into the barren, closely cropped cattle pasture on our left. Something indefinable in its manner or appearance excited my suspicions, and I stole up to the fence and looked over. The bird was a horned lark, the first one that I had ever set eyes on in the nesting season. He seemed to be very hungry, snapping up insects with the greatest avidity, and was not in the least disturbed by our somewhat eager attentions. It was plain at the first glance that he was of the Western variety,--a prairie horned lark, in other words,--for even in the best of lights the throat and sides of the head were white, or whitish, with no perceptible tinge of yellow.

The prairie lark is one of the birds that appear to be shifting or extending their breeding range. It was first described as a sub-species in 1884, and has since been found to be a summer resident of northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and, in smaller numbers, of western Massachusetts. It is not impossible, expansion being the order of the day, that some of us may live long enough to see it take up its abode within sight of the gilded State House dome.

My own previous acquaintance with it had been confined to the sight of a few migrants along the seashore in the autumn, although my companion on the present trip had seen it once about a certain upland farm here in Franconia. That was ten years ago, and we have again and again sought it there since, without avail.

Our bird of to-day interested me by displaying his “horns,”--curious adornments which I had never been able to make out before, except in pictures. They were not carried erect,--like an owl’s “ears,” let us say,--but projected backwards, and with the head at a certain angle showed with perfect distinctness. The bird would do nothing but eat, and as our own dinner awaited us we continued our tramp. We would try to see more of him and his mate at another time, we promised ourselves.

First, however, we paid a visit (that very afternoon) to the upland farm just now spoken of. “Mears’s,” we always call it. Perhaps the larks would be there also. But we found no sign of them, and the bachelor occupant of the house, who left his plough in the beanfield to offer greeting to a pair of strangers, assured us that nothing answering to our description had ever been seen there within his time; an assertion that might mean little or much, of course, though he seemed to be a man who had his eyes open.

This happened on May 17. Six days afterward, in company with an entomological collector, we were again in the dusty valley. I went into the larch swamp in search of a Cape May warbler--found here two years before--one of the very best of our Franconia birds; and the entomologist stayed near by with her net and bottles, while the second man kept on a mile farther up the valley to look for thorn-bush specimens. So we drove the sciences abreast, as it were. My own hunt was immediately rewarded, and when the botanist returned I thought to stir his envy by announcing my good fortune; but he answered with a smile that he too had seen something; he had seen the prairie lark soaring and singing. “Well done!” said I; “now you may look for the Cape May, and incidentally feed the mosquitoes, and the lady and I will get into the carriage and take our turn with _Otocoris_.” So said, so done. We drove to the spot, the driver stopped the horses opposite a strip of ploughed land, and behold, there was the bird at that very moment high in the air, hovering and singing. It was not much of a song, I thought, though the entomologist, hearing partly with the eye, no doubt, pronounced it beautiful. It was most interesting, whatever might be said of its musical quality, and as we drove homeward my companion and I agreed that we would take up our quarters for a day or two at the nearest house, and study it more at our leisure. Possibly we should happen upon a nest.

In the forenoon of May 25, therefore, we found ourselves comfortably settled in the very midst of a lark colony. The birds, of which there were at least five (besides two pairs found half a mile farther up the valley), were to be seen or heard at almost any minute; now in the road before the house, now in the ploughed land close by it, now in one of the cattle pastures, and now on the roofs of the buildings. One fellow spent a great part of his time upon the ridgepole of the barn (a pretty high structure), commonly standing not on the very angle or ridge, but an inch or two below it, so that very often only his head and shoulders would be visible. Once I saw one dusting himself in the rut of the road. He went about the work with great thoroughness and unmistakable enjoyment, cocking his head and rubbing first one cheek and then the other into the sand. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I thought I heard him saying.

So far as we could judge from our two days’ observation, the birds were most musical in the latter half of the afternoon, say from four o’clock to six. Contrary to what we should have expected, we saw absolutely no ascensions in the early morning or after sunset, although we did see more than one at high noon. It is most likely, I think, that the birds sing at all hours, as the spirit moves them, just as the nightingale does, and the hermit thrush and the vesper sparrow.

As for the quality and manner of the song, with all my listening and studying I could never hit upon a word with which to characterize it. The tone is dry, guttural, inexpressive; not exactly to be called harsh, perhaps, but certainly not in any true sense of the word musical. When we first heard it, in the distance (let the qualification be noted), the same thought came to both of us,--a kingbird’s formless, hurrying twitters. There is no rhythm, no melody, nothing to be called phrasing or modulation,--a mere jumble of “splutterings and chipperings.” Every note is by itself, having to my ear no relation to anything before or after. The most striking and distinguishing characteristic of it all is the manner in which it commonly hurries to a conclusion--as if the clock were running down. “The hand has slipped from the lever,” I more than once found myself saying. I was thinking of a motorman who tightens his brake, and tightens it again, and then all at once lets go his grip. At this point, this sudden acceleration and conclusion, my companion and I always laughed. The humor of it was irresistible. It stood in such ludicrous contrast with all that had gone before,--so halting and labored; like a man who stammers and stutters, and then, finding his tongue unexpectedly loosened, makes all speed to finish. Sometimes--most frequently, perhaps--the strain was very brief; but at other times a bird would sit on a stone, or a fence-post, or a ridgepole, and chatter almost continuously by the quarter-hour. Even then, however, this comical hurried phrase would come in at more or less regular intervals. I imagined that the larks looked upon it as the highest reach of their art and delivered it with special satisfaction. If they did, I could not blame them; to us it was by all odds the most interesting part of their very limited repertory.

The most interesting part, I mean, of that which appealed to the ear; for, as will readily be imagined, the ear’s part was really much the smaller half of the performance. The wonder of it all was not the music by itself (that was hardly better than an oddity, a thing of which one might soon have enough), but the music combined with the manner of its delivery, while the singer was climbing heavenward. For the bird is a true skylark. Like his more famous cousin, he does not disdain the humblest perch--a mere clod of earth answers his purpose; but his glory is to sing at heaven’s gate.

His method at such times was a surprise to me. He starts from the ground silently, with no appearance of lyrical excitement, and his flight at first is low, precisely as if he were going only to the next field. Soon, however, he begins to mount, beating the air with quick strokes and then shutting his wings against his sides and forcing himself upward. “Diving upward,” was the word I found myself using. Up he goes,--up, up, up, “higher still, and higher,”--till after a while he breaks into voice. While singing he holds his wings motionless, stiffly outstretched, and his tail widely spread, as if he were doing his utmost to transform himself into a parachute--as no doubt he is. Then, the brief, hurried strain delivered, he beats the air again and makes another shoot heavenward. The whole display consists of an alternation of rests accompanied by song (you can always see the music, though it is often inaudible), and renewed upward pushes.

In the course of his flight the bird covers a considerable field, since as a matter of course he cannot ascend vertically. He rises, perhaps, directly at your feet, but before he comes down, which may be in one minute or in ten, he will have gone completely round you in a broad circle; so that, to follow him continuously (sometimes no easy matter, his altitude being so great and the light so dazzling), you will be compelled almost to put your neck out of joint. In our own case, we generally did not see him start, but were made aware of what was going on by hearing the notes overhead.

One grand flight I did see from beginning to end, and it was wonderful, amazing, astounding. So I thought, at all events. There was no telling, of course, what altitude the bird reached, but it might have been miles, so far as the effect upon the beholder’s emotions was concerned. It seemed as if the fellow never would be done. “Higher still, and higher.” Again and again this line of Shelley came to my lips, as, after every bar of music, the bird pushed nearer and nearer to the sky. At last he came down; and this, my friend and I always agreed, was the most exciting moment of all. He closed his wings and literally shot to the ground head first, like an arrow. “Wonderful!” said I, “wonderful!” And the other man said: “If I could do that I would never do anything else.”

Here my story might properly enough end. The nest of which we had talked was not discovered. My own beating over of the fields came to nothing, and my companion, as if unwilling to deprive me of a possible honor, contented himself with telling me that I was looking in the wrong place. Perhaps I was. It is easy to criticise. For a minute, indeed, one of the farm-hands excited our hopes. He had found a nest which might be the lark’s, he thought; it was on the ground, at any rate; but his description of the eggs put an end to any such possibility, and when he led us to the nest it turned out to be occupied by a hermit thrush. Near it he showed us a grouse sitting upon her eggs under a roadside fence. It was while repairing the fence that he had made his discoveries. He had an eye for birds. “Those little humming-birds,” he remarked, “_they_’re quite an animal.” And he was an observer of human nature as well. “That fellow,” he said, speaking of a young man who was perhaps rather good-natured than enterprising, “that fellow don’t do enough to break the Sabbath.”

And this suggests a bit of confession. We were sitting upon the piazza, on Sunday afternoon, when a lark sang pretty far off. “Well,” said the botanist, “he sings as well as a savanna sparrow, anyhow.” “A savanna sparrow!” said I; and at the word we looked at each other. The same thought had come to both of us. Several days before, in another part of the township, we had heard in the distance--in a field inhabited by savanna and vesper sparrows--an utterly strange set of bird-notes. “What is that?” we both asked. The strain was repeated. “Oh, well,” said I, “that must be the work of a crazy savanna. Birds are given to such freaks, you know.” The grass was wet, we had a long forenoon’s jaunt before us, and although my companion, as he said, “took no stock” in my explanation, we passed on. Now it flashed upon us both that what we had heard was the song of a prairie lark. “I believe it was,” said the botanist. “I know it was,” said I; “I would wager anything upon it.” And it was; for after returning to the hotel our first concern was to go to the place--only half a mile away--and find the bird. And not only so, but twenty-four hours later we saw one soaring in his most ecstatic manner over another field, a mile or so beyond, beside the same road.

The present was a good season for horned larks in Franconia, we told ourselves. Two years ago, at this same time of the year, I had gone more than once past all these places. If the birds were here then I overlooked them. The thing is not impossible, of course; there is no limit to human dullness; but I prefer to think otherwise. A man, even an amateur ornithologist, should believe himself innocent until he is proved guilty.

A QUIET MORNING

“Such was the bright world on the first seventh day.”

HENRY VAUGHAN.

It is Sunday, May 26, the brightest, pleasantest, most comfortable of forenoons. I am seated in the sun at the base of an ancient stone wall, near the road that runs along the hillside above the Landaff Valley. Behind me is a little farmhouse, long since gone to ruin. At my feet, rather steeply inclined, is an old cattle pasture thickly strewn with massive boulders. The prospect is one of those that I love best. In the foreground, directly below, is the valley, freshly green, and, as it looks from this height, as level as a floor. Alder rows mark the winding course of the river, and on the farther side, close against the forest, runs a road, though the eye, of itself, would hardly know it.

Across the valley are the glorious newly clad woods, more beautiful than words can begin to tell; and beyond them rise the mountains: Moosilauke, far enough away to be blue; the shapely Kinsman range, at whose long green slopes no man need tire of looking; rocky Lafayette, directly in front of me; Haystack, with its leaning knob; the sombre Twins and the more Alpine-looking Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. Farther to the north are the low hills of Cleveland and Agassiz. A magnificent horizon. Lafayette, Washington, Jefferson, and Adams are still flecked with snow. And over the mountains is the sky, with high white clouds, cirrus and cumulus. I look first at the mountains, then at the valley, which is filled with sunlight as a cup is filled with wine. The level foreground is the essential thing. Without it the grandest of mountain prospects is never quite complete.

Swallows circle about me continually, a phœbe calls at short intervals, and less often I hear the sweet voice of a bluebird. Both phœbe and bluebird are most delightfully plentiful in all this fair mountain country. They are of my own mind: they like old farms within sight of hills. Crows caw, a jay screams, and now and then the hurrying drumbeats of a grouse come to my ears. Somewhere in the big sugar grove behind me a great-crested flycatcher has been shouting almost ever since I sat down. The “great screaming flycatcher,” he should be called. His voice is more to the point than his crest. He loves the sound of it.

How radiantly beautiful the red maple groves are just now! I can see two, one near, the other far off, both in varying shades of red, yellow, and green. The earth wears them as ornaments, and is as proud of them, I dare believe, as of the Parthenon. They are bright, but not too bright. They speak of youth--and the eye hears them. A red-eye preaches as if he knew the day of the week. What a gift of reiteration! “Buy the truth,” he says. “Going, going!” But it is never gone. Down the valley road goes an open carriage. In it are a man and a woman, the woman with a parasol over her head. A song sparrow sings his little tune, and the bluebird gives himself up to warbling. Few voices can surpass his for sweetness and expressiveness. The grouse drums again (let every bird be happy in his own way), a myrtle warbler trills (a talker to himself), and a passing goldfinch drops a melodious measure. All the chokecherry bushes are now in white. The day may be Whitsunday for all that my unchurchly mind can say. Red cherries, which whitened the world a few days ago, are fast following the shadbushes, which have been out of flower for a week. Apple trees, too, have passed the height of their splendor. The vernal procession moves like a man in haste.

The sun grows warm. I will betake myself to the maple grove and sit in the shadow; but first I notice in the grass by the wall an abundance of tiny veronica flowers (speedwell)--white, streaked with purple, as I perceive when I pluck one. Not a line but runs true. Everything is beautiful in its time; the little speedwell no less than the valley and the mountain. A red squirrel, far out on a tilting elm spray, is eating his fill of the green fruit. Mother Earth takes care of her children. She raises elm seeds as man raises wheat. And foolish man wonders sometimes at what he thinks her waste of vital energy.

I have found a seat upon a prostrate maple trunk, one of the fathers of the grove, so huge of girth that it was almost a gymnastic feat to climb into my position. Here I can see the valley and the mountains only in parts, between the leafy intervening branches. Which way of seeing is the better I will not seek to determine. Both are good--both are better than either. A flycatcher near me is saying _chebec_ with such emphasis that though I cannot see him I can imagine that he is almost snapping his head off at every utterance. Much farther away is a relative of his; we call him the olive-side. (I wonder what name the birds have for us.) _Que-quee-o_, he whistles in the clearest of tones. He is one of the good ones. And how well his voice “carries”--as if one grove were speaking to another!

About my feet are creamy white tiarella spires and pretty blue violets. The air is full of the hum of insects, but they are all innocent. I sit under my own beech and maple tree, with none to molest or make me afraid. How many times I have heard something like that on a Sunday forenoon! Year in and out, our dear old preacher could never get through his “long prayer” without it. He would not be sorry to know that I think of him now in this natural temple.

An unseen Nashville warbler suddenly announces himself. “If you must scribble,” he says, “my name is as good as anybody’s.” The little flycatcher has not yet dislocated his neck. _Chebec, chebec_, he vociferates. The swallows no longer come about me. They care not for groves. They are for the open sky, the grass fields, and the sun; but I hear them twittering overhead. If I could be a bird, I think I would be a swallow. Hark! Yes, there is the syllabled whistle of a white-breasted nuthatch. He must go into my vacation bird-list--No. 79, _Sitta carolinensis_. If he would have shown himself sooner he should have had a higher place. And now, to my surprise, I hear the rollicking voice of a bobolink. The meadow below contains many of his happy kind, and one of them has come up within hearing to brighten my page.

All the time I have sat here I have been hoping to hear the hearty, “full-throated” note of a yellow-throated vireo. This is the only place in Franconia where I have ever heard it--two years ago this month. But the bird seems not to be here now, and I must not stay longer. My companion, who has gone higher up the hill to visit a thorn-bush, will be expecting me on the bridge by the old grist-mill.

Before I can get away, however, I add another name to my bird-list,--a welcome name, the wood pewee’s. He has just arrived from the South, I suppose. What a sweetly modulated, plaintive-sounding whistle! How different from the bobolink’s “jest and youthful jollity!” And now the crested breaks out again all at once, after a long silence. There is a still stronger contrast. Four flycatchers are in voice together: the crested, the olive-sided, the least, and the wood pewee. I have heard them all within the space of a minute. As soon as I am in the valley I shall hear the alder flycatcher, and when, braving the mosquitoes, I venture into the tamarack swamp a little way to look at the Cape May warbler (I know the very spot) I shall doubtless hear the yellow-belly. These, with the kingbird and the phœbe, which are about all the farms, make the full New Hampshire contingent. No doubt there are flies enough for all of them.

As I start to leave the grove, stepping over beds of round-leaved violets and spring-beauties, both out of flower already, I start at the sound of an unmusical note, which I do not immediately recognize, but which in another instant I settle upon as a sapsucker’s. This is a bird at whose absence my companion and I have frequently expressed surprise, remembering how common we have found him in previous visits. I go in pursuit at once, and presently come upon him. He is in extremely bright plumage, his crown and his throat blood red. He goes down straightway as No. 81. I am having a prosperous day. Three new names within half an hour! Idling in a sugar orchard is good for a man’s bird-list as well as for his soul.

An oven-bird is declaiming, a blue yellow-back is practicing scales, and a field sparrow is chanting. And even as I pencil their names a nuthatch (the very one I have been hearing) flies to a maple trunk and alights for a moment at the door of his nest. Without question he passed a morsel to his brooding mate, though I was not quick enough to see him. Yes, within a minute or two he is there again; but the sitting bird does not appear at the entrance; her mate thrusts his bill into the door instead. The happy pair! There is much family life of the best sort in a wood like this. No doubt there are husbands and wives, so called, in Franconia as well as in other places, who might profitably heed the old injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.”

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY

The greatest ornithological novelty of our present visit to Franconia was the prairie horned larks, whose lyrical raptures, falling “from heaven or near it,” I have already done my best to describe. The rarest bird (for there is a difference between novelty and rarity) was a Cape May warbler; the most surprisingly spectacular was a duck. Let me speak first of the warbler.

Two years ago I found a Cape May settled in a certain spot in an extensive tract of valley woods. The manner of the discovery--which was purely accidental, the bird’s voice being so faint as to be inaudible beyond the distance of a few rods--and the pains I took to keep him under surveillance for the remainder of my stay, so as to make practically sure of his intention to pass the summer here, have been fully recounted in a previous chapter. The experience was one of those which fill an enthusiast with such delight as he can never hope to communicate, or even to make seem reasonable, except to men of his own kind.

We had never met with _Dendroica tigrina_ before anywhere about the mountains, and I had no serious expectation of ever finding it here a second time. Still “hope springs immortal;” “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;” and one of my earliest concerns, on arriving in Franconia again at the right season of the year, was to revisit the well-remembered spot and listen for the equally well-remembered sibilant notes.

Our first call was on May 17. Perhaps we were ahead of time; at any rate, we found nothing. On the 23d we passed the place again, and heard, somewhat too far away, what I believed with something like certainty to be the _zee-zee-zee-zee_ of the bird we were seeking; but the dense underbrush was drenched with rain, we had other business in hand, and we left the question unsettled. If the voice really was the Cape May’s we should doubtless have another chance with him. So I told my companion; and the result justified the prophecy, which was based upon the bird’s behavior of two years before, when all his activities seemed to be very narrowly confined--say within a radius of four or five rods.

We had hardly reached the place, two days afterward, before we heard him singing close by us,--in the very clump of firs where he had so many times shown himself,--and after a minute or two of patience we had him under our opera-glasses. The sight gave me, I am not ashamed to confess, a thrill of exquisite pleasure. It was something to think of--the return of so rare a bird to so precise a spot. With all the White Mountain region, not to say all of northern New England and of British America, before him, he had come back from the tropics (for who could doubt that he was indeed the bird of two years ago, or one of that bird’s progeny?) to spend another summer in this particular bunch of Franconia evergreens. He had kept them in mind, wherever he had wandered, and, behold, here he was again, singing in their branches, as if he had known that I should be coming hither to find him.

The next day our course took us again past his quarters, and he was still there, and still singing. I knew he would be. He could be depended on. He was doing exactly as he had done two years before. You had only to stand still in a certain place (I could almost find it in the dark, I think), and you would hear his voice. He was as sure to be there as the trees.

That afternoon some ladies wished to see him, and my companion volunteered his escort. Their experience was like our own; or rather it was better than ours. The warbler was not only at home, but behaved like the most courteous of hosts; coming into a peculiarly favorable light, upon an uncommonly low perch, and showing himself off to his visitors’ perfect satisfaction. It was bravely done. He knew what was due to “the sex.”

On the morning of the 27th I took my farewell of him. He had been there for at least five days, and would doubtless stay for the season. May joy stay with him. I think I have not betrayed his whereabouts too nearly. If I have, and harm comes of it, may my curse follow the man that shoots him.

The “spectacular duck,” of which I have spoken, was one of several (three or more) that seemed to be settled in the valley of the Landaff River. Our first sight of them was on the 20th; two birds, flying low and calling, but in so bewildering a light, and so quick in passing, that we ventured no guess as to their identity. Three days later, on the morning of the 23d, we had hardly turned into the valley before we heard the same low, short-breathed, grunting, grating, croaking sounds, and, glancing upward, saw three ducks steaming up the course of the river. This time, as before, the sun was against us, but my companion, luckier than I with his glass, saw distinctly that they carried a white speculum or wing-spot.

We were still discussing possibilities, supposing that the birds themselves were clean gone, when suddenly (we could never tell how it happened) we saw one of them--still on the wing--not far before us; and even as we were looking at it, wondering where it had come from, it flew toward the old grist-mill by the bridge and came to rest on the top of the chimney! Here was queerness. We leveled our glasses upon the creature and saw that it was plainly a merganser (sheldrake), with its crest feathers projecting backward from the crown, and its wing well marked with white. Its head, unless the light deceived me, was brown. The main thing, however, for the time being, was none of these details, but the spectacle of the bird itself, in so strange and sightly a position. “It looks like the storks of Europe,” said my companion. Certainly it looked like something other than an every-day American duck, with its outstretched neck and its long, slender, rakish bill showing in silhouette against the sky.

Meanwhile, it had put its head partly out of sight in the top of the chimney, as if it had a nest there and were feeding its young. Then of a sudden it took wing, but in a minute or two was back again, to our increasing wonderment; and again it dropped the end of its bill out of sight below the level of the topmost bricks. Now, however, I could see the mandibles in motion, as if it were eating. Probably it had brought a fish up from the river. The chimney was simply its table. Again, for no reason that was apparent to us, it flew away, and again, after the briefest absence, it returned. A third time it vanished, and this time for good. We kept on our way up the valley, talking of what we had seen, but after every few rods I turned about to put my glass upon the chimney. Evidently that was the duck’s favorite perch, I said; we should find it there often. But whether my reasoning was faulty or we were simply unfortunate, the fact is that we saw it there no more. On the 25th, at a place two miles or more above this point, we saw a duck of the same kind--at least it was uttering the same grating, croaking sounds as it flew; and a resident of the neighborhood, whom we questioned about the matter, told us that he had noticed such birds (“ducks with white on their wings”) flying up and down the valley, and had no doubt that they summered there. As to their fondness for chimney-tops he knew nothing; nor do I know anything beyond the simple facts as I have here set them down. But I am glad of the picture of the bird that I have in my mind.

Enthusiasm is a good painter; it is not afraid of high lights, and it deals in fast colors. And to us old Franconians, enthusiasm seems to be one of the institutions, one of the native growths, one of the special delectabilities, if you please, of that delectable valley. The valley of cinnamon roses, we have before now called it; the valley of strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries; the valley of bobolinks and swallows; but best of all, perhaps, it is the valley of hobbyists. Its atmosphere is heady. We all feel it. The world is far away. Worldly successes, yea, dollars and cents themselves, are nothing, and less than nothing, and vanity. A new flower, a new bird, the hundred and fiftieth spider, these are the things that count. We are like members of a conventicle, or like the logs on the hearth. Our inward fires are mutually communicative and sustaining. We laugh now and then, it may be, at one another’s peculiarities. Each of us can see, at certain moments, that the other is “a little off,” to use a “Francony” phrase; not quite “all there,” perhaps; a kind of eighth dreamer, “moving about in worlds not realized;” but at bottom we are sympathetic and appreciative. We would not have each other different, unless, indeed, it were a little younger. A grain of oddity is a good spice. If we are not deeply interested in the newest discovery, at least we participate in the exultation of the discoverer.

“That’s a good fly,” said the entomologist. We were driving, three of us, talking of something or nothing (we are never careful which it is), when the happy dipteran blundered into the carriage, and into the very lap of its admirer. Ten seconds more, and it was under the anæsthetic spell of cyanide of potassium, which (so we are told) puts its victims to sleep as painlessly, perhaps as blissfully, as chloroform. It was an inspiration to see how instantly the lady recognized a “good” one (it was one of a thousand, literally, for the day was summer-like), and how readily, and with no waste of motions, she made it her own. I was reminded of a story.

A friend of mine, a truly devout woman, of New England birth, and churchly withal (her books have all a savor of piety, though all the world reads them), is also an enthusiastic and widely famous entomological collector. One Sunday she had gone to church and was on her knees reciting the service (or saying her prayers--I am not sure that I remember her language verbatim), when she noticed on the back of the pew immediately in front of her a diminutive moth of some rare and desirable species. Instinctively her hand sought her pocket, and somehow, without disturbing the congregation or even her nearest fellow-worshiper (my helpless masculine mind cannot imagine how the thing was done) she found it and took from it a “poison bottle,” always in readiness for such emergencies. Still on her knees (whether her lips still moved is another point that escapes positive recollection), she removed the stopple, placed the mouth of the vial over the moth (which had probably imagined itself safe in such ecclesiastical surroundings), replaced the stopple above it, slipped the bottle back into her pocket, and resumed (or kept on with) her prayers. All this had taken but a minute. And who says that she had done anything wrong? Who hints at a disagreement between science and faith? Nay, let us rather believe with Coleridge--

“He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things, both great and small,”--

especially small church-going lepidoptera of the rarer sorts.

With zealots like this about you, as I have intimated, you may safely speak out. If you have seen an unexpected, long-expected warbler, or a chimney-top duck, or a skyward soaring lark, you may talk of it without fear, with no restraint upon your feelings or your phrases. Here things are seen as they are; truth is cleared of false lights, and Wisdom is justified of her children. Happy Franconia!

“Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove’s large eyebrow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows?”

Happy Franconia! “Nested and quiet in a valley mild!” I think of her June strawberries and her perennial enthusiasms, and I wish I were there now.

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ

Mount Agassiz is rather a hill than a mountain; there is no glory to be won in climbing it, unless, perhaps, by very small children and elderly ladies; but if a man is in search of a soul-filling prospect he may climb higher and see less. The road to it, furthermore (I speak as a Franconian), is one of those that pay the walker as he goes along. Every rod of the five miles is worth traveling for its own sake, especially on a bright and comfortable August morning such as the Fates had this time sent me. It was eight o’clock when I set out, and with a sandwich in my pocket I meant to be in no haste. If invitations to linger by the way were as many and as pressing as I hoped for, a mile and a quarter to the hour would be excellent speed.

Red crossbills and pine siskins were calling in the larch trees near the house as I left the piazza. The siskins have never been a frequent sight with me in the summer season, and finding almost at once a flock in the grass by the roadside, feeding upon seeds, as well as I could make out, and delightfully fearless, I stopped for a few minutes to look them over. Some of the number showed much more yellow than others, but none of them could have been dressed more strictly in the fashion if their costumes had come straight from Paris. Every bird was in stripes.

Both they and the crossbills are what writers upon such themes agree to pronounce “erratic” and “irregular.” Of most birds it can be foretold that they will be in certain places at certain times; their orbits are known; but crossbills and siskins wander through space as the whim takes them. If they have any schedule of times and seasons, men have yet to discover it. When I come to Franconia, for example, I never can tell whether or not I shall find them; a piece of ignorance to be thankful for, like many another. The less knowledge, within limits, the more surprise; and the more surprise--also within limits--the more pleasure. At present I can hardly put my head out of the door without hearing the wheezy calls of siskins and the importunate cackles of crossbills. They are among the commonest and most voluble inhabitants of the valley, and seem even commoner and more talkative than they really are because they are so incessantly on the move.

An alder flycatcher is calling as I go up the first hill (he, too, is very common and very free with his voice, although, unlike siskin and crossbill, he knows where he belongs, and is to be found there, and nowhere else), and when I reach the plateau a sapsucker alights near the foot of a telegraph post just before me; a bird in Quakerish drab, with no trace of red upon either crown or throat. He (or she) is only two or three months old, I suppose, like more than half of all the birds now about us. Not far beyond, as the road runs into light woods, with a swampy tract by a brook on the lower side, I hear a chickadee’s voice and look up to see also two Canadian warblers, bits of pure loveliness, the first ones of my present visit. I talk to them, and one, his curiosity responsive to mine, comes near to listen. The Canadian warbler, I have long noticed, has the bump of inquisitiveness exceptionally well developed.

So I go on--a few rods of progress and a few minutes’ halt. If there are no birds to look at, there are always flowers, leaves, and berries: goldthread leaves, the prettiest of the pretty--it is a joy to praise them; and dwarf cornel berries, gorgeous rosettes; and long-stemmed mountain-holly berries, of a color indescribable, fairly beyond praising; and bear-plums, the deep-blue berries of the clintonia. And while the eye feasts upon color the ear feasts upon music: a distant brook babbling downhill among stones, and a breath of air whispering in a thousand treetops; noises that are really a superior kind of silence, speaking of deeper and better things than our human speech has words for. Quietness, peace, contentment, we say; but such vocables, good as they are, are but poor renderings of this natural chorus of barely audible sounds. If you are still enough to hear it--inwardly still enough--as may once in a long while happen, you feel things that tongue of man never uttered. Life itself is less sweet. Now and then, as I listen, I seem to hear a voice saying, “Blessed are the dead.” I foretaste a something better than this separate, contracted, individual state of being which we call life, and to which in ordinary moods we cling so fondly. To drop back into the Universal, to lose life in order to find it, this would be heaven; and for the moment, with this musical woodsy silence in my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must be that I express myself awkwardly, for I am never so much a lover of earth as at such a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now. Fair are the white-birch stems; fair are the gray-green poplars. This is my third day, and my spirit is getting in tune.

In the white-pine grove, where a few small birds are stirring noiselessly among the upper branches, my attention is taken by clusters of the ghostly, colorless plant which men know as the Indian pipe (its real name, of necessity, is quite beyond human ken); the flowers, every head bowed, just breaking through a bed of last year’s needles, while a bumblebee, a capable economic botanist, visits them one by one. Then, as I emerge from the grove on its sunny edge, I catch a sudden pungent odor of balsam. It rises from the dry leaves, the sunlight having somehow set it free. In the shade of the wood nothing of the kind was perceptible. The fact strikes me curiously as one that I have often been half consciously aware of, but now for the first time really notice. On the instant I am taken far back. It is a July noon; I am trudging homeward, and in my proud boyish hand is a basket of shining black huckleberries carefully rounded over. The sense of smell is naturally a sentimentalist; or perhaps the olfactory nerves have some occult connection with the seat of memory.

Here is one of my favorite spots: a level grassy field, with a ruined house and barn behind me, between the road and a swampy patch, and in front “all the mountains,” from Moosilauke to Adams. How many times I have stopped here to admire them! I look at them now, and then fall to watching the bluebirds and the barn swallows, that are here at home. A Boston lady holds the legal title to the property (be it said in her honor that she bought it to save the pine wood from destruction), but the birds are its actual owners. Six bluebirds sit in a row on the wire, while the swallows go twittering over the field. Once I fancy that I hear the sharp call of a horned lark; but the note is not repeated, and though I beat the grass over I discover nothing.[12]