A FIGHT TO THE DEATH 327 



berry bushes and the hop vines weighted with rustic 

 loveliness, then is our sense rapt with the picture, and 

 Tom Moore's ecstatic outburst over the Vale of Cash- 

 mere comes to our recollection and leaps from our 

 tongue : 



" What a wilderness of flowers ! " 



The picture is full of Nature's dainty touches. She 

 is a rare painter, and the man whose sense of beauty 

 sleeps unroused by her miraculous coloring must be a 

 clod, and his life can hardly be worth the living. 



However, if the beauty of the flowers and the 

 grasses and the lush meadows and the ripening fields 

 of rye, waving their golden billows in the sunlight 

 if all this pulchritude doesn't convince his eyes that 

 Nature is marvelously nice in making up a summer 

 toilet for Pike, perhaps her feathered warblers might 

 appeal to another of his senses. Her songsters are 

 here in wondrous variety and multiply amazingly 

 which, by the way, is also true of some of her goodly 

 game-birds, notably the quail, the ruffed grouse and 

 the woodcock. 



When I arrived here it was night and my ears were 

 greeted only by the sad song of the whip-poor-will. 

 He seemed ubiquitous, for I heard him reciting " the 

 ballad of his grief " from every direction. Sunrise, 

 however, put an end to his melancholy ditty, and 

 then the bird concert began. To distinguish the 



