A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 11 



lina, some years ago, I have never seen so many 

 together. A grand'" migratory wave " must have 

 broken on the mountains within a night or two. 

 As far as music is concerned, the grosbeaks have 

 the field mostly to themselves, though a grouse 

 beats his drum at short intervals, and now and 

 then a white-throat whistles. There is no bird's 

 voice to which a fog is more becoming, I say to 

 myself, with a pleasing sense of having said 

 something unintended. To my thinking, the 

 white-throat should always be a good distance 

 away (perhaps because in the mountains one 

 grows accustomed to hearing him thus) ; and 

 the fog puts him there, with no damage to the 

 fullness of his tone. 



Looking at the flowers along the wayside, 

 a few yellow violets, a patch of spring-beauties, 

 and little else, my eye falls upon what seems 

 to be a miniature forest of curious tiny plants 

 growing in the gutter. At first I see only the 

 upright, whitish stalks, an inch or two in height, 

 each bearing at the top a globular brown knob. 

 Afterward I discover that the stalks, which, ex- 

 amined more closely, have a crystalline, glassy 

 appearance, spring from a leaf -like or lichen-like 

 growth, lying prostrate upon the wet soil. The 

 plant is a liverwort, or scale-moss, of some kind, 

 I suppose, and is growing here by the mile. How 



