220 LOVERS OF NATURE 



her slightest favors count ! The other evening, 

 as I stood on the slope of a hill in the twilight, 

 I heard a whistling of approaching wings, and 

 presently a woodcock flying low passed near 

 me. I could see his form and his long curved 

 wings dimly against the horizon ; his whistling 

 slowly vanished in the gathering night, but his 

 passage made something stir and respond within 

 me. March was on the wing, she was abroad 

 in the soft still twilight searching out the 

 moist, springy places where the worms first 

 come to the surface and where the grass first 

 starts; and her course was up the valley from 

 the south. A day or two later I sat on a hill- 

 side in the woods late in the day, amid the 

 pines and hemlocks, and heard the soft, elusive 

 spring call of the little owl — a curious musical 

 undertone hardly separable from the silence; a 

 bell, muffled in feathers, tolling in the twilight 

 of the woods and discernible only to the most 

 alert ear. But it was the voice of spring, the 

 voice of the same impulse that sent the wood- 

 cock winging his way through the dusk, that 

 was just beginning to make the pussy willows 

 swell and the grass to freshen in the spring 

 runs. 



Occasionally, of a bright, warm, still day in 

 March, such as we have had the present season, 

 the little flying spider is abroad. It is the 

 most delicate of all March tokens, but very 

 suggestive. Its long, waving threads of gossa- 

 mer, invisible except when the sunlight falls 

 upon them at a particular angle, stream out here 



