SPRING AND SUMMER MEET 51 



and carry many girdling scars, received during 

 the spring migration of the sapsuckers. 



A catbird and a thrasher were in the shrub- 

 bery, but neither lent his services to the enter- 

 tainment, and so both were in the capacity of 

 listeners. They seemed rather out of their ele- 

 ment in these bare woods, for it is seldom that 

 they reach the northern woods before the burst- 

 ing out of the foliage. Leaves and green things 

 seem as necessary to these chaps as water to a 

 fish. This is especially true of the catbird; he 

 comes flitting into the shadows of the thickets 

 just when the first gum-scented leaves of the 

 poplar begin to whisper in the May breezes — no 

 sooner and no later — and he delays his departure 

 in the autumn till those leaves come whispering 

 down and the woods are bare. So now neither 

 of these rival songsters had the heart to tune up. 

 The catbird had no shady thicket from which to 

 entertain, and the thrasher, no green mound of 

 verdure beneath his song-tree, into which to dart 

 downward at the end of each number ; so both of 

 them remained silent. 



It was with reluctance that we turned away 

 from the rendezvous and slipped along up an old 

 wood-road. Here a rustle on the leaves at- 



