ALABAMA. Ill 



His was a temperament which could not, however, for 

 any length of time be depressed. After three years of 

 confinement to a dreary Canadian township, he was now 

 seeing the world again, and, what was important, going 

 southwards, to warmth and sunlight. As they drove 

 through the numerous villages of Vermont, he was capti- 

 vated by the pretty, neat, and trim houses of wood, brightly 

 painted, and as different as possible from the gaunt log- 

 houses of Compton. In the woods he saw for the first 

 time glades full of the paper-birch (Mr. Lowell's "birch, 

 most shy and ladylike of trees "), with its dead-white bark, 

 so unlike the glossy and silky surface of the common 

 birch. One night they heard "from the most sombre and 

 gloomy recesses of the black-timbered forest the tinkle of 

 the saw-whetter. The unexpectedness of the sound struck 

 me forcibly, and, cold as it was, I stopped the horse for 

 some time to listen to it. In the darkness and silence of 

 midnight the regularly recurring sound, proceeding too 

 from so gloomy a spot, had an effect on my mind, 

 solemn and almost unearthly, yet not unmixed with 

 pleasure. Perhaps the mystery hanging about the origin 

 of the sound tended to increase the effect. It is like the 

 measured tinkle of a cow-bell, or regular strokes upon a 

 piece of iron quickly repeated." It is supposed that the 

 saw-whetter is a bird, but I believe that the author of this 

 sound, familiar to New England woodsmen, has never been 

 positively identified. 



Late on the third day the travellers reached Burlington. 

 The vast and frozen lake, a huge expanse of snow, crossed 

 in every direction by dirty sledge and sleigh tracks, was 

 dreary and uninteresting. Jaques immediately returned, 

 and Philip Gosse was left in this remote Yankee town, 

 without a single acquaintance in the wide world, and 

 utterly depressed in spirits. The same night, since there 



