A PERFECT NOOK. 11 



apology for a song ; the vireo in yonder tree 

 spares us not one of his never-ending plati- 

 tudes. But the hermit thrush goes on with 

 sublime indifference to the voices of common 

 folk down below. Sometimes he is answered 

 from afar by another of his kind, who arranges 

 his notes a little differently. The two seem to 

 wait for each other, as if not to mar their divine 

 harmony by vulgar haste or confusion. 



" We must find the ' see-here ' bird," said my 

 friend the next morning, when she appeared at 

 the door of the farmhouse, and I joined her for 

 our second tramp. This was a bird whose long, 

 deliberate notes, sounding like the above words, 

 had tantalized me from the day of my arrival. 



We resolved this time to go into the woods 

 we had skirted the night before. A set of bars 

 admitted us to a most enticing bit of forest, a 

 paradise to city-weary eyes and nature-loving 

 hearts. From the bars rose sharply a rough 

 wood road, while a few steps to the right and a 

 scramble up a rocky path changed the whole 

 world in a moment. We were in a perfect 

 nook, which I had discovered a few days before, 

 with a carpet of dead leaves, a sky of waving 

 branches, the fierce sun shut out by curtains of 

 living green, the air cooled by a clear moun- 

 tain stream, and the '' priceless gift of delicious 



