148 SCRAPING ACQUAINTANCE. 



winter wren was in the brush ; but what proof 

 had I 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. From a 



