Where Town and Country Meet 



startle you when they flop up, clumsily, just 

 ahead of you, as you are skirting the 

 marshes. 



Both the woodcock and the English snipe, 

 or Wilson's snipe, have a delicate, mysteri 

 ous, and beautiful song with which they 

 accompany their evening flights in spring 

 and summer. You may hear it often above 

 the marshes when you can not see the birds 

 aloft in the twilight. It is a tremulous song, 

 on a sliding scale from high to low, very 

 plaintive, tender, and sweet. Indeed, most 

 of these night songs and sounds have a 

 plaintive quality and are pitched in a minor 

 key very befitting the hour and the associ 

 ations, it would seem. Many of them are 

 wholly mysterious, even to those who have 

 heard them season after season. But for 

 that very reason, perhaps, they are all the 

 more affecting and charming. For I am 

 thoroughly in sympathy with those who 

 think that too much exact knowledge takes 

 something of the romance and poetry out 

 of our acquaintance with nature. There 

 must be a certain indefiniteness, a certain 

 hazy quality, in our knowledge of the outer 

 world we must not, in a word, know na- 

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