No hostile forms with axe or spud now visit these solitudes. The cows
have half-hidden ways through them, and know where the best browsing
is to be had. In spring, the farmer repairs to their bordering of
maples to make sugar; in July and August women and boys from all the
country about penetrate the old Barkpeelings for raspberries and
blackberries; and I know a youth who wonderingly follows their languid
stream casting for trout.

In like spirit, alert and buoyant, on this bright June morning go I
also to reap my harvest,--pursuing a sweet more delectable than sugar,
fruit more savory than berries, and game for another palate than that
tickled by trout.

June, of all the months, the student of ornithology can least afford
to lose. Most birds are nesting then, and in full song and plumage.
And what is a bird without its song? Do we not wait for the stranger
to speak? It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard
its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human
interest to me. I have met the gray-cheeked thrush in the woods, and
held him in my hand; still I do not know him. The silence of the
cedar-bird throws a mystery about him which neither his good looks nor
his petty larcenies in cheery time can dispel. A bird's song contains
a clew to its life, and establishes a sympathy, an understanding,
between itself and the listener.

I descend a steep hill, and approach the hemlocks through a large
sugar-bush. When twenty rods distant, I hear all along the line of the
forest the incessant warble of the red-eyed vireo, cheerful and happy
as the merry whistle of a schoolboy. He is one of our most common and