82 IN THE WHI9? MOUNTAINS. 
away from home; but in the one case he has 
nothing but his own safety to consult, while in 
the other he is thinking of those whose lives 
are more to him than his own, and whose hid- 
ing-place he is every moment on the alert to 
conceal. 
In Massachusetts we do not expect to find 
sparrows in deep woods. They belong in fields 
and pastures, in roadside thickets, or by fence- 
rows and old stone-walls bordered with bar- 
berry bushes and alders. But these white- 
throats are children of the wilderness. It is 
one charm of their music that it always comes, 
or seems to come, from such a distance, — from 
far up the mountain-side, or from the inaccessi- 
ble depths of some ravine. I shall not soon for- 
get its wild beauty as it rose out of the spruce 
forests below me, while I was enjoying an 
evening promenade, all by myself, over the 
long, flat summit of Moosilauke. From his 
habit of singing late at night this sparrow is in 
some places known as the nightingale. His 
more common name is the Peabody bird; while 
a Jefferson man, who was driving me over the 
Cherry Mountain road, called him the Peverly 
bird, and told me the following story : — 
A farmer named Peverly was walking about 
his fields one spring morning, trying to make 
up his mind whether the time had come to put 
