IN THE HEMLOCKS. 75 



am betraying no confidence in making the 

 matter public here. I think this is pre- 

 eminently his love-song, as I hear it oftenest 

 about the mating season. I have caught 

 half-suppressed bursts of it from two males 

 chasing each other with fearful speed through 

 the forest. 



Turning to the left from the old road, I 

 wander over soft logs and gray yielding 

 debris, across the little trout brook, until I 

 emerge in the overgrown " Bark-peeling," 

 pausing now and then on the way to admire 

 a small, solitary white flower which rises 

 above the moss, with radical, heart-shaped 

 leaves, and a blossom precisely like the liver- 

 wort except in color, but which is not put 

 down in my botany, or to observe the 

 ferns, of which I count six varieties, some 

 gigantic ones nearly shoulder-high. 



At the foot of a rough, scraggy yellow 

 birch, on a bank of club-moss, so richly in- 

 laid with partridge-berry and curious shining 

 leaves with here and there in the bordering 

 a spire of the false wintergreen strung with 

 faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath 

 of a May orchard that it looks too costly 

 a couch for such -an idler, I recline to note 

 what transpires. The sun is just past the 



