He is not much in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely
any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject of
our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their figures
or their songs. A writer in the "Atlantic" [Footnote: For December,
1853] gravely tells us the wood thrush is sometimes called the hermit,
and then, after describing the song of the hermit with great beauty
and correctness, cooly ascribes it to the veery! The new Cyclopaedia,
fresh from the study of Audubon, says the hermit's song consists of a
single plaintive note, and that the veery's resembles that of the wood
thrush! The hermit thrush may be easily identified by his color; his
back being a clear olive-brown becoming rufous on his rum and tail. A
quill from his wing placed beside one from his tail on a dark ground
presents quite a marked contrast.

I walk along the old road, and note the tracks in the thin layer of
mud. When do these creatures travel here? I have never yet chanced to
meet one. Here a partridge has set its foot; there, a woodcock; here,
a squirrel or mink; thee, a skunk; there, a fox. What a clear, nervous
track reynard makes! how easy to distinguish it from that of a little
dog,--it is so sharply cut and defined! A dog's track is coarse and
clumsy beside it. There is as much wildness in the track of an animal
as in its voice. Is a deer's track like a sheep's or a goat's? What
winged-footed fleetness and agility may be inferred from the sharp,
braided track of the gray squirrel upon the new snow! Ah! in nature is
the best discipline. How wood-life sharpens the senses, giving a new
power to the eye, the ear, the nose! And are not the rarest and most
exquisite songsters wood-birds?

Everywhere in these solitudes I am greeted with the pensive, almost
pathetic not of the wood pewee. The pewees are the true flycatchers,