A DAY IN JUNE 129 



running, I should liardly be traversing these 

 miles of rough mountain country on a day of 

 tropical sultriness. The clear line of the 

 track gives me not only passage and a breeze, 

 but an opening into the sky, and at least 

 twice as many bird sights and bird sounds 

 as the unbroken forest would furnish.^ I 

 drink at the section men's well — an ice-cold 

 spring inclosed in a bottomless barrel — 

 cross the brook which, gloriously alive and 

 beautiful, comes dashing over its boulders 

 down the White-cross Eavine, fifty feet be- 

 low me as I guess, and stop in the burning 

 on the other side to listen for woodpeckers 

 and brown creepers. The latter are strangely 

 rare hereabout, and this seems an ideal spot 

 in which to look for them. So I cannot help 

 thinking as I see from how many of the 

 trunks — burned to death and left standing 



1 I was once walking over these same miles of sleepers 

 with a bird-loving' man, when he recalled a reminiscence 

 of his boyhood. One of his teachers was remarking upon 

 the need of seeking things in their appropriate places. 

 " Now if you wanted to see birds," he said, by way of il- 

 lustration, "you wouldn't go to a railroad track." 

 " Which is the very place we do go to," my companion 

 added. 



