The Evening Grosbeak 



BY SAMUEL SCOVILLE, JR. 



The Athenians marked special days with a white stone. Our 

 calender-makers use red letters. There are better ways. 

 Fringed gentian, rose-red and snow-white orchids, the song of 

 a veery, the hidden treasure of a rare nest, wind-swept barrens, 

 jade-green pools — there are many better markers for a day than 

 a colored number. A bird from the north all dusky -gold and 

 velvet-black and ivory-white will always mark for me the 29th 

 of January, 1917. 



It had been a hard month of wrangling days in superheated 

 courts and brief-ridden nights. Through them all, however, 

 there was the whisper of a little cabin in the 'heart of the pine- 

 barrens and of two priceless days that fell between terms. At 

 last the first of them dawned and by mid-morning I was follow, 

 ing a path that zigzagged through thickets of scrub-oak to the 

 cabin set in a grove of pitch-pines. Below me the crooked 

 Rancocas wound its way back and forth like a brown snake. I 

 slipped into some old clothes, and all the worry of the month 

 fell off my shoulders and rolled down the bank and was 

 drowned in the golden water. It was an absolutely silent 

 winter day and as I walked for miles and miles through 

 stretches of low green pines and past pools set in golden sphag- 

 num moss with only the caw of a passing crow drifting down 

 from the blue sky or the tiny notes of the Golden-crowned King- 

 let to break the stillness, the silence seeped in bringing with it 

 the comfort and peace of the wilderness. I walked all day 

 following out a maze of paths that led to Annie's Bog, Indiola 

 Bog, Sheep Pen's Hill and around in a great circle to Lower 

 Mill. I saw nothing unusual among the birds that day except 

 a broad-winged hawk. Juncos, Carolina Chickadees, Buzzards, 

 Myrtle Warblers, Tree Sparrows, Downy and Hairy Woodpeck- 



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