168 HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS. 
4 
sound his silver horn; the red squirrel will cackle from 
his safe retreat above you, and the little chickadee lisp 
his good-morning, and while you watch and listen, half 
dreaming and half thinking, broad day-light and the 
duties of another day will be upon you. As the season 
advances and the snow disappears, the animals that 
have hibernated again show themselves, and others 
return to their old haunts in the woods. The large 
hen-hawks come back to nest in the elms, and every 
day they may be seen in their aerial flight circling 
above the trees ; nothing can be more graceful than the 
flight of the larger hawks. How one envies them 
their leisurely journey in the upper air! and, when the 
noisier crows come in numbers to assail them, with 
what indifference is the attack received; if the assault 
is continued till it becomes annoying, the hawk poises 
his pinions, and mounts upward, beyond the equipoise 
of the clumsier and more groveling birds. 
You meet the timid little rabbit at every turn, and 
after a while it ceases to appear startled at your 
approach. The squirrels are chatty and noisy, appar- 
ently delighted with the presence of man. The bird 
that pleases you most and startles you oftenest as it 
goes whirring through the woods is the partridge. You 
may find the hen nesting in some open place soon after 
the snow is off the ground, while the male bird will 
reassure her by his martial drumming from some moss- 
covered log in an adjoining thicket. It would indeed 
be a lonely woods in which there were no squirrels or 
partridges. Would to heaven that laws could be so 
