hovering flight, like certain of the finches, and bursts into a
perfect ecstasy of song,--clear, ringing, copious, rivaling the
goldfinch's in vivacity, and the linnet's in melody. This strain is
one of the rarest bits of bird melody to be heard, and is oftenest
indulged in late in the afternoon or after sundown. Over the woods,
hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest strain. In this
song you instantly detect his relationship to the
water-wagtail,--erroneously called water-thrush,--whose song is
likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful
joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good
fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was
little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as
Thoreau by his mysterious night-warbler, which, by the way, I suspect
was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The
little bird himself seems disposed to keep the matter a secret, and
improves every opportunity to repeat before you his shrill,
accelerating lay, as if this were quite enough and all he laid claim
to. Still, I trust I am betraying no confidence in making the matter
public here. I think this is preeminently his love-song, as I hear it
oftenest about the mating season. I have caught half-suppressed bursts
of it from two males chasing each other with fearful speed through the
forest.

Turning to the left from the old road, I wander over soft logs and
gray yielding debris, across the little trout brook, until I emerge in
the overgrown Barkpeeling,--pausing now and then on the way to admire
a small, solitary now and then on the way to admire a small, solitary
white flower which rises above the moss, with radical, heart-shaped
leaves, and a blossom precisely like the liverwort except in color,
but which is not put down in my botany,--or to observe the ferns, of