leaning post was overgrown with woodbine. The rails were gray and
moss-grown. Nature was trying hard to make it a bit of the landscape;
it could not much longer retain its individuality. The wild things of
the woods had long accepted it as theirs, though not quite as they
accepted the vines and trees.

As I sat there a robin hurled himself upon it from the top of a young
cedar where he had been, a moment before, practising his mating song.
He did not intend to light, but some idle curiosity, like my own, made
him pause a moment on the old gray rail. Then a woodpecker lit on the
side of a post, and sounded it softly. But he was too near the ground,
too near his enemies to make a noise; so he flew to a higher perch and
beat a tattoo that made the woods ring. He was safe there, and could
make as much noise as he pleased. A wood-mouse stirred the vines and
appeared for an instant on the lower rail, then disappeared as if very
much frightened at having shown himself in the sunlight. He always
does just so at his first appearance.

Presently a red squirrel rushes out of the thicket at the left,
scurries along the rails and up and down the posts. He goes like a
little red whirlwind, though he has nothing whatever to hurry about.
Just opposite my stump he stops his rush with marvelous suddenness;
chatters, barks, scolds, tries to make me move; then goes on and out
of sight at the same breakneck rush. A jay stops a moment in a young
hickory above the fence to whistle his curiosity, just as if he had
not seen it fifty times before. A curiosity to him never grows old. He
does not scream now; it is his nesting time.--And so on through the
afternoon. The old fence is becoming a part of the woods; and every
wild thing that passes by stops to get acquainted.