GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS 411 



it, like the bursting of its bubbles with music, the bead 

 on liquids just uncorked. Their song gilds thus the 

 frostwork of the morning. As if the fog were a great 

 sweet froth on the surface of land and water, whose 

 fixed air escaped, whose bubbles burst with music. The 

 sound of its evaporation, the fixed air of the morning 

 just brought from the cellars of the night escaping. The 

 morning twittering of birds in perfect harmony with it. 

 . . . The fog condenses into fountains and streams of 

 music, as into the strain of the bobolink which I hear, 

 and runs off so. The music of the birds is the tinkling 

 of the rills that flow from it. I cannot see twenty rods. 



July 30, 1852. What a gem is a bird's egg^ especially 

 a blue or a green one, when you see one, broken or whole, 

 in the woods ! I noticed a small blue egg this afternoon 

 washed up by Flint's Pond and half buried by white 

 sand, and as it lay there, alternately wet and dry, no 

 color could be fairer, no gem could have a more advan- 

 tageous or favorable setting. Probably it was shaken 

 out of some nest which overhung the water. I fre- 

 quently meet with broken egg-shells where a crow, per- 

 chance, or some other thief has been marauding. And 

 is not that shell something very precious that houses 

 that winged life ? 



Aug. 6, 1852. How different the feeble twittering 

 of the birds here at sunrise from the full quire of the 

 spring ! Only the wood thrush, a huckleberry-bird or 

 two, or chickadee, the scream of a flicker or a jay, or 

 the caw of a crow, and commonly only an alarmed note 

 of a robin. A solitary peawai ^ may be heard, per- 



^ [Wood pewee.] 



