DRAGON’S BLOOD 217 
To him who will but listen there are adventures in 
bird-songs anywhere, any time, and any season. It 
was but last winter that I found myself again in the 
dawn-dusk facing a defiant hickory, armed only with 
an axe. Let me recommend to every man who is 
worried about his body, his soul, or his estate during 
the winter months, that he buy or borrow a well- 
balanced axe and cut down and cut up a few trees 
for fire-wood. As he forces the tingling iced oxygen 
into every cell of his lungs, he will find that he is 
taking a new view of life and love and debt and death, 
and other perplexing and perennial topics. 
Quite recently I read a journal that a young 
minister kept, back in the fifties. One entry espe- 
cially appealed to me. 
“Decided this morning that I was not the right 
man for this church. Chopped wood for two hours 
in Colonel Hewitt’s wood-lot. Decided that this 
was the church for me and that I was the man for 
this church.”’ 
On this particular morning, I heard once more the 
wild dawn-song of the Carolina wren, full of liquid 
bell-like overtones. AsI listened, my mind went back 
to another wren-song. I had been hunting for the 
nest of a yellow palm warbler in a little gully in the 
depths of a northern forest. The blood ran down my 
face from the fierce bites of the black-flies, and the 
mosquitoes stung like fire. Suddenly, from the side of 
the tiny ravine, began a song full of ringing, glassy 
notes such as one makes by running a wet finger rap- 
idly on the inside of a thin glass finger-bowl. Listen- 
