AT WHITTIER'S BIRTHPLACE 23 



filled with boyhood fancies and echoes of boyhood 

 laughter. A chewink, singing on a treetop up the 

 slope, voiced this feeling. Someone has called the 

 chewink the tambourine bird. His song makes 

 the name a deserved one. It consists of one clear, 

 melodious call and then an ecstatic tinkling as of a 

 tambourine skillfully shaken and dripping joyous 

 notes. Always before the chewink' s song has 

 been without words to me. This one sang so 

 clearly "Whittier; ting-a-ling-a-ling " that I 

 knew the bird and his ancestors had made the glen 

 home since the boyhood of the poet, learning to 

 sing the name that rang oftenest through the 

 tinkle of the brook. 



You begin to climb Job's Hill right from the 

 glen, passing from beneath its trees to stone- 

 walled mowing fields where rudbeckias dance in 

 the morning wind, their yellow sunbonnets flap- 

 ping and flaring about homely black faces. I 

 fancy these fields were white with ox-eye daisies 

 in the spring. They are yellow now with the 

 sunbonnets of these jolly wenches. It is like 

 getting from Alabama to New England to step 

 over the last wall which divides the fields of the 



