tion, she got inside and began pecking here and there at the rim, apparently giving it the final touches. The tufted tits whistled unseen with all their characteristic monotony. The veeries and the olive-back kept silence, but the wood thrushes, as was their daily habit, made the woods ring. One of them was building a nest.

Most admired of all were the Kentucky warblers, of which there were at least five. It was my first real sight of them, and, fortunately, they were not in the least bashful. They spent the time mostly on the ground, in open, grassy places, especially about the roots of trees and thorn-bushes, the latter now snowy with bloom, once in a while hopping a few inches up the bole, as if to pick off insects. In movement and attitude they made me think often of the Connecticut warbler, although when startled they took a higher perch. Once I saw one of them under a pretty tuft of the showy blue baptisia (B. australis), — a new bird in the shadow of a new flower! Who says that life is an old story? From the general manner of the birds, -more easily felt than defined, well as from their presence in a group and their silence, I inferred, rightly or wrongly, that they had but recently arrived. For aught I yet knew, they might be nothing but wayfarers, a happy uncertainty which made them only the more interesting. Of their beauty I have already spoken. It would be impossible to speak of it too highly.

as

As I took the car at noon, I caught sight of a wonderfully bright blood-red flower on the bank above the track, and, as I was the only passenger, the conductor kindly waited for me to run up and pluck it. It turned out to be a catchfly, and, like the Kentucky warbler, it became common a little later. "Indian pink," one of my Walden's Ridge friends said it was called; a pretty name, but to me "battlefield pink" or "carnage pink" would have seemed more appropriate.

I had found an aviary, I thought, this open grove of Aunt Tilly's, with its treasure of a brook, and at the earliest opportunity I went that way again. Indeed, I went more than once. But the birds were no longer there. What I had seen was mainly a flock of "transients," a migratory "wave." On the farther side of the Ridge, however, I by and by discovered a spot more permanently attractive, - a little valley in the hillside. Here was a spring, and from it, nearly dry as it was, there still oozed a slender rill, which trickled halfway down the slope before losing itself in the sand, and here and there dribbled into a basin commodious enough for a small bird's bath. Several times I idled away an hour or two in this retreat, under the shadow of red maples, sweet gums, sycamores, and tupelos, making an occasional sortie into the sun as an adventurous mood came over me or a distant bird-call proved an irresistible attraction.

They were pleasant hours, but I recall them with a sense of waste and discomfort. In familiar surroundings, such waitings upon Nature's mood are profitable, wholesome for body and soul; but in vacation time, and away from home, with new paths beckoning a man this way and that, and a new bird, for aught he can tell, singing beyond the next hill, at such a time, I think, sitting still becomes a burden, and the cheerful practice of "a wise passiveness" a virtue beyond the comfortable reach of ordinary flesh and blood. Along the upper edge of the glen a road ran downward into the valley east of the Ridge, and now and then a carriage or a horseman passed. It would have been good to follow them. All that valley country, as I surveyed it from the railway and the tower, had an air of invitingness: beautiful woods, with footpaths and unfrequented roads. In them I must have found birds, flowers, and many a delightful nook. If the Fates could have sent me one cool day!

Yet for all my complaining, I have lived few more enjoyable Sunday forenoons than one that I passed most inactively in this same hillside hollow. As I descended the bank to the spring, two or three goldfinches were singing (goldfinch voices go uncommonly well in chorus, and the birds seem to know it); a female tanager sat before me calling clippity, clippity; a field sparrow, a mocking wren, and a catbird sang in as many different directions; and a pair of thrashers whose nest could not be far away flitted nervously about, uttering characteristic moaning whistles. If they felt half as badly as their behavior indicated, their case was tragical indeed; but at the moment, instead of pitying them, I fell to wondering just when it is that the thrasher smacks (all friends of his are familiar with his resounding imitation of a kiss), and when it is that he whistles. I have never made out, although I believe I know pretty well the states of mind thus expressed. The thrasher is to a peculiar degree a bird of passion; ecstatic in song, furious in anger, irresistibly pitiful in lamentation. How any man can rob a thrasher's nest with that heartbroken whistle in his ears is more than I can imagine.

Indigo-birds are here, of course. Their number is one of the marvels of this country, though indeed the country seems made for them, as it is also for chats and white-eyed vireos. A bit farther down the valley, as I come to the maples and tupelos, with their grateful density of shade, a wood pewee sings, and then a wood thrush. At the same moment, an Acadian flycatcher, who is always here (his nest is building overhead, as, after a while, I discover), salutes me with a quick, spiteful note. "No trespassing," he says. Landowners are pretty much alike. I pass on, but not far, and beside a little thicket I take up my stand, and wait. It is pleasant here, and patience will be rewarded. Yes, there is a magnolia warbler, my second

Tennessee specimen; a great beauty, but without that final perfection of good taste (simplicity) which distinguishes the Kentucky. I see him, and he is gone, and I am not to be drawn into a chase. Now I have a glimpse of a thrush; an olive-back, from what I can see, but I cannot be sure. Still I keep my place. A blue-gray gnatcatcher is drawling somewhere in the leafy treetops. Thence, too, a cuckoo fires off a lively fusillade of kuks, a yellow-bill, by that token. Next a blackpoll warbler shows himself, still far from home, though he has already traveled a long way northward; and then, in one of the basins of the stream (if we may call it a stream, in which there is no semblance of a current), a chat comes to wash himself. Now I see the thrush again; or rather, I hear him whistle, and by moving a step or two I get him with my eye. He is an olive-back, as his whistle of itself would prove; and presently he begins to sing, to my intense delight. Soon two others are in voice with him. Am I on Missionary Ridge or in the Crawford Notch? I stand motionless, and listen and listen, but my enjoyment is interrupted by a new pleasure. A warbler, -evidently a female, from a certain quietness and plainness,— and, as I take it, a blue-winged yellow, though I have never seen a female of that species, comes to the edge of the water, and in another minute her mate is beside her. Him there is no mistaking. They fly away in a bit of lovers' quarrel, a favorite pastime with mated birds. And look! there is a scarlet tanager; the same gorgeous fellow, I suppose, that was here two days ago, and the only one I have seen in this lower country. What a beauty he is! One of the finest; handsomer, so I think, than the handsomest of his all-red cousins. Now he calls chip-cherr, and now he breaks into song. There he falls behind; his cousin's voice is less hoarse, and his style less labored and jerky.

Now straight before me up a woody aisle, an olive-backed thrush stands in full view and a perfect light, facing me and singing, a lovely chorister. Looking at him, I catch a flutter of yellow and black among the leaves by the streamlet; a Kentucky warbler, I suspect, but I dare not go forward to see, for now the thrushes are in chorus again. By and by he comes up from his bath, and falls to dressing his feathers: not a Kentucky, after all, but a Canadian flycatcher, my first one here. He, too, is an exquisite, with fine colors finely laid on, and a most becoming jet necklace. While I am admiring him, a blue yellowback begins to practice his scales still

a little blurred, and needing practice, a critic might say somewhere at my right among the hillside oaks; another exquisite, a beauty among beauties. I see him, though he is out of sight. And what seems odd, at this very moment his rival as a singer of the scale, the prairie warbler, breaks out on the other side of me. Like the chat and the indigo-bird, he is abundantly at home hereabout.

All this woodland music is set off by spaces of silence, sweeter almost than the music itself. Here is peace unbroken; here is a delicious coolness, while the sun blazes upon the dusty road above me. How amiable a power is contrast -on its softer side! I think of the eager, bloody, sweaty, raging men who once stormed up these slopes, killing and being killed. The birds know nothing of all that. It might have been thousands of years ago. The very trees have forgotten it. Two or three cows come feeding down the glade, with the lazy tinkle of a bell. And now my new friend, the blue-winged yellow warbler, sings across the path (across the aisle, I was going to say), but only two or three times, and with only two insignificant lisping syllables. The chary soul! He sings to the eye, I suppose. I go over to look at him, and my sudden movement startles the thrushes, who, finding themselves again

in the singers' gallery, cannot refrain from another chorus. At the same moment the Canadian warbler comes into sight again, this time in a tupelo. The blue-wings are found without difficulty; they have a call like the black-and-white creeper's. A single rough-winged swallow skims above the treetops. I have seen him here before, and one or two others like him. Compared with New England, this corner of Tennessee seems but poorly supplied with swallows.

As I return to the bed of the valley, a female cardinal grosbeak flutters suspiciously about a thicket of tall blackberry vines. Her nest should be there, I think, but a hasty look reveals nothing. Again I come upon the Canadian warbler. If there is only one here, he is often in my way. I sit down upon the leaning, almost horizontal bole of a large tupelo, - a new tree to me, but common in this country. The thick dark-colored bark is broken deeply into innumerable small geometrical figures, giving the tree a noticeable, venerable appearance, as wrinkles lend distinction and character to an old man's face. Another species, which, as far as I can tell, should be our familiar tupelo of Massachusetts, is equally common, a smaller tree with larger leaves. The moisture here, slight as it now is, gives the place a vegetation of its own and a peculiar density of leafage. From one of the smaller tupelos (I repeat that word as often as I can, for the music of it) cross-vine streamers are swinging, full of red-and-yellow bells. Scattered thinly over the ground are yellow starflowers, the common houstonia, a pink phlox, and some unknown dark yellow blossom a little like the fall dandelion, - Cynthia, I guess.

My thoughts are recalled by a strong, sharp chip in a voice I do not recognize, -a Kentucky warbler's, as presently turns out. He walks about the ground amid the short, thin grass, seemingly in the most placid of moods; but at every few steps, for some inscrutable reason,

he comes out with that quick, peremptory call. And all the while I keep saying to myself, "What a beauty!" But my forenoon is past. I rise to go, and at the motion he takes flight. Near the spring the goldfinches are still in full chorus, and just beyond them in the path is a mourning dove.

That was a good season: hymns without words, "a sermon not made with hands," and the world shut out. Three days afterward, fast as my vacation was running away, I went to the same place again. The olive-backed thrushes were still singing, to my surprise, and the Kentucky warblers were still feeding in the grass. The scarlet tanager sang (it is curious how much oftener I mention him than the comparatively unfamiliar, but here extremely common summer tanager), the cuckoo called, the Acadian flycatcher was building her nest, on a horizontal limb of a maple, and a goldfinch warbled as if he could never cease. A veery sang, also (I heard but one other in Tennessee), with a chestnut-sided warbler, two redstarts (one of them in the modest garb of his mother), a Carolina chickadee, a mocking wren, a pine warbler, a prairie warbler, and a catbird. In time, probably, all the birds for a mile around might have been heard or seen beside that scanty rill.

To-day, however, my mood was less Sundayish than before, and in spite of the heat I ventured across an open pasture,

where a Bachman's finch was singing an ingenious set of variations, and a rabbit stamped with a sudden loudness that made me jump, — and then through a piece of wood, till I came to another hollow like the one I had left, but without water, and therefore less thickly shaded. Here was the inevitable thicket of brambles (since I speak so much of chats and indigo-birds, the presence of a sufficiency of blackberry bushes may be taken for granted), and I waited to see what it would bring forth. A field sparrow sang from the hillside, a sweet and modest

tune that went straight to the heart, and had nothing to fear from a comparison with Bachman's finch or any other. What a contrast in this respect between him and his gentle-seeming but belligerent and tuneless cousin whom we call "chippy"! Here, likewise, were a pair of complaining Carolina wrens and an Acadian flycatcher. A thrush excited my curiosity, having the look of a graycheek, but showing a buff eye-ring; and while I was coaxing him to whistle, and so declare himself,—often a ready means of identification, and preferable on all accounts to shooting the bird, there came a furious outburst from the depths of the brier patch, with a grand flurry of wings: a large bird and two smaller ones engaged in sudden battle, as well as I could make out. At the close of the mêlée, which ended as abruptly as it had begun, the thicket showed two wrens, a white-throated sparrow, and a female cardinal. The cardinal flew away; the affair was no business of hers, apparently; but in a minute she was back again, scolding. Then, while my back was turned, everything became quiet; and on my stepping up to reconnoitre, there she sat in her nest with four eggs under her. At that moment a chat's loud voice was heard, and, turning quickly, I caught the fellow in the midst of a brilliant display of his clownish tricks, ridiculous, indescribable. At a little distance, it is hard to believe that it can be a bird, that dancing, shapeless thing, balancing itself in the air with dangling legs and prancing, swaying motions. Well, that is the chat's way. What more need be said? Every creature must express himself, and birds no less than other poets are entitled to an occasional "fine frenzy."

My little excursion had brought me nothing new, and, like all my similar ventures on Missionary Ridge, it ended in

1 If I could have my way, he should be known as the doorstep sparrow. The name would fit him to a nicety.

defeat. The sun was too much for me; to use a word suggested by the place, it carried too many guns. I took a long and comfortable siesta under a magni

ficent chestnut oak. Then it was near noon, and, with my umbrella spread, I mounted the hill to the railway, and waited for a car.

Bradford Torrey.

I.

ŌSAKA-Kyōtō RAILWAY,
April 15, 1895.

FEELING drowsy in a public conveyance, and not being able to lie down, a Japanese woman will lift her long sleeve before her face ere she begins to nod. In this second-class railway carriage there are now three women asleep in a row, all with faces screened by the left sleeve, and all swaying together with the rocking of the train, like lotos flowers in a soft current. (This use of the left sleeve is either fortuitous or instinctive; probably instinctive, as the right hand serves best to cling to strap or seat in case of shock.) The spectacle is at once pretty and funny, but especially pretty, as exemplifying that grace with which a refined Japanese woman does everything,- always in the daintiest and least selfish way possible. It is pathetic, too, for the attitude is also that of sorrow, and sometimes of weary prayer, all because of the trained sense of duty to show only one's happiest face to the world.

Which fact reminds me of an experi

ence.

A male servant long in my house seemed to me the happiest of mortals. He laughed invariably when spoken to, looked always delighted while at work, appeared to know nothing of the small troubles of life. But one day I peeped at him when he thought himself quite alone, and his relaxed face startled me. It was not the face I had known. Hard lines of pain and anger appeared in it,

making it look twenty years older. I coughed gently to announce my presence. At once the face smoothed, softened, lighted up as by a miracle of rejuvenation. Miracle, indeed, of perpetual unselfish self-control.

II.

Kyōrō, April 16. The wooden shutters before my little room in the hotel are pushed away, and the morning sun immediately paints upon my shōji, across squares of gold light, the perfect sharp shadow of a little peachtree. No mortal artist—not even a Japanese could surpass that silhouette! Limned in dark blue against the yellow glow, the marvelous image even shows stronger or fainter tones according to the varying distance of the unseen branches outside. It sets me thinking about the possible influence on Japanese art of the use of paper for house-lighting purposes.

By night, a Japanese house with only its shōji closed looks like a great papersided lantern, a magic-lantern making moving shadows within instead of without itself. By day, the shadows on the shōji are from outside only; but they may be very wonderful at the first rising of the sun, if his beams are leveled, as in this instance, across a space of quaint garden.

There is certainly nothing absurd in that old Greek story which finds the origin of art in the first untaught attempt to trace upon some wall the outline of a lover's shadow. Very possibly, all sense of art, as well as all sense of the super