248 IN BIRD LAND. 
“ The birds are here, for all the season’s late; 
They take the sun’s height, an’ don’ never wait; 
Soon ’z he officially declares it’s spring, 
Their light hearts lift’em on a north’ard wing, 
An’ th’ ain’t an acre, fur ez you can hear, 
Can’t by the music tell the time o’ year.” 
Sometimes a single line or phrase proclaims our 
poet’s loving familiarity with the feathered world, 
and gives his verse an outdoor flavor that positively 
puts a tonic into the appreciative reader’s veins, 
almost driving him out beneath the shining vault of 
the sky; as when the poet refers to “the cock’s 
shrill trump that tells of scattered corn;’’ or to 
“the thin-winged swallow skating on the air;” or 
laments because “snowflakes fledge the summer’s 
or remarks incidentally that the “ cat-bird 
’ or that “the robin sings, 
or that “the single crow 
or asks, “Is a thrush 
gurgling from the brake?’’ How vivid and full of 
woodsy suggestion are the following lines from that 
captivating poem, ‘ Al Fresco” : — 
) 
nest ;’ 
croons in the lilac-bush ;’ 
as of old, from the limb ;’ 
? 
? 
a single caw lets fall;’ 
“The only hammer that I hear 
Is wielded by the woodpecker, 
The single noisy calling his 
In all our leaf-hid Sybaris.” 
Nothing could be more characteristic of wood- 
peckerdom than that quatrain. Still more rhyth- 
mical are the first six lines—a metrical sextette 
that sing themselves — of the poem entitled “ ‘The 
Fountain of Youth,’ — 
