FAR AND NEAR 



a dapper, fidgety, gesticulating, bobbing-up-and- 

 down-and-out-and-in little bird, and yet full of such 

 sweet, wild melody! To get him at his best, one 

 needs to hear him in a dim, northern hemlock 

 wood, where his voice reverberates as in a great hall; 

 just as one should hear the veery in a beech and 

 birch wood, beside a purling trout brook, when the 

 evening shades are falling. It then becomes to you 

 the voice of some particular spirit of the place and 

 the hour. The veery does not inhabit the woods im- 

 mediately about my cabin, but in the summer twi- 

 light he frequently comes up from the valley below 

 and sings along the borders of my territory. How 

 w^elcome his simple flute-like strain! The wood 

 thrush is the leading chorister in the woods about me. 

 He does not voice the wildness, but seems to give a 

 touch of something half rural, half urban, — such is 

 the power of association in bird-songs. In the even- 

 ing twilight I often sit on the highest point of the 

 rocky rim of the great granite bowl that holds my 

 three acres of prairie soil, and see the shadows 

 deepen, and listen to the bird voices that rise up 

 from the forest below me. The songs of many wood 

 thrushes make a sort of golden warp in the texture of 

 sounds that is being woven about me. Now the 

 flight-song of the oven-bird holds the ear, then the 

 fainter one of the worm-eating warbler lures it. The 

 carol of the robin, the vesper hymn of the tanager, 

 the flute of the veery, are all on the air. Finally, as 



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