around us, and the succession of sights and sounds, the order of the
unfolding of the leaves, from the willow to the oak, the singing of
the frogs in the marshes, and the birds in the copses and fields (for
in the great woods there are few singing birds). I knew them all, and
when and where to hear them. The bluebird, or blue robin, as it was
called in our neighborhood, was the first, and he assured us that
spring had really come with a plaintive song, the sweetest to memory
of all nature's voices; then the American robin (the migratory
thrush), a bold, cheery note, full of summer life; and after those the
chief was the bobolink, singing up into the sky like the skylark, and
with which we connected the ripening of the strawberry, the merriest
and most rollicking of all bird songs, as that of the bluebird was the
tenderest. Then came the hermit thrush, heard only in the depth of
the forest, shy and remote in his life and nesting, and the
whip-poor-will, in the evening. Each was a new leaf turned over in my
book of life, the reading of which was my only happiness. What else,
or more, could be expected of an existence hedged in by the terrors of
eternity, the hauntings of an inevitable condemnation, unless I could
obtain some mysterious renovation, only attainable through an act of
divine grace which no human merit could entitle me to, and which I
tried in vain to win the benediction of? And how dreary seemed the
heaven I was set to win--no birds, no flowers, no fields or forests,
only the eternal continuation of the hymn-singing and protracted
meetings, in which, in our system, consisted the glorification of
God, which was the end and aim of our existences! I wonder how many
religious parents remember the misery of child life under such
influences.

The struggles of conscience through which I went in those days can be
imagined by no one, and I can hardly realize them myself, except by