IV. 



BIRDS OF THE BROOKSIDE. 



r FTHE pleasantest of all my walks leads me along the banks of a rural 

 -*- stream, where animals of the land, the air, and the water make each 

 other's acquaintance. 



The brook comes down from the hills, meanders through a meadow 

 fringed with trees, darts under the rude bridge where the road crosses, 

 and goes gurgling on through depth and shallow, here lost among the 

 reeds of a marsh, there running the gantlet of the old mill-wheel, until 

 the cover of deep woods is reached, and it can afford to saunter slowly 

 under the quiet shade of the oaks and sycamores. 



I am impelled to seek its banks by the same constant instinct that led 

 Thoreau always to walk towards the south-west. He thought this in- 

 scrutable impulse in him was a part of the settled migratory tendency of 

 the race, insisting on individual as well as national progress westward — an 

 orientation of the mind inspiring poetry and myths the world over. 



But the avenues of entrance to a new continent have always been 

 by its rivers, so it may be that my impulse towards the brook is equally 

 owing to a prevailing tendency of humanity; yet I only think of the 

 walk in that direction, if it occurs to me to notice the matter at all, as 

 the quickest way of withdrawing into the wilderness. 



" The attractiveness of a brook," said Thoreau, "depends much on the 

 character of its bottom. I love just now to see one flowing through soft 

 sand like this, where it wears a deep but irregular channel, now wider and 

 shallower, with distinct ripple marks, now shelving off suddenly to in- 

 distinct depths, meandering as well up and down as from side to side, 

 deepest where narrowest, and even gullying under this bank or that, its 

 bottom lifted up to one side or the other, the current inclining to one 

 side. I stop to look at the circular shadows of the dimples over the 

 yellow sand, and the dark-brown clams on their edges in the sand at the 

 bottom. ... A pure brook is a very beautiful object to study minutely. 

 It will bear the closest inspection, even to the line air-bubbles, like minute > 



