148 SCRAPING A pte UAINT ANCE. 
winter wren was in the brush; but what proof 
had [ that the bird and the song belonged to- 
gether? No; I must see him in the act of 
singing. But this, I found, was more easily 
said than done. In Jefferson, in Gorham, in 
the Franconia Notch, in short, wherever I 
went, there was no difficulty about hearing the 
music, and little about seeing the wren ; but it 
was provoking that eye and ear could never 
be brought to bear witness to the same bird. 
However, this difficulty was not insuperable, 
and after it was once overcome I was in the 
habit of witnessing the whole performance 
almost as often as I wished. 
Of similar interest to me is a turn in an old 
Massachusetts road, over which, boy and man, 
I have traveled hundreds of times; one of those 
delightful back-roads, half road and half lane, 
where the grass grows between the horse-track 
and the wheel-track, while bushes usurp what 
ought to be the sidewalk. Here, one morning 
in the time when every day was disclosing two 
or three new species for my delight, I stopped 
to listen to some bird of quite unsuspected 
identity, who was calling and singing and scold- 
ing in the Indian brier thicket, making, in truth, 
a prodigious racket. I twisted and turned, and 
was not a little astonished when at last I de- 
tected the author of all this outcry. Froma 
