80 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 



sluggish wings from some recess of the shore. With its 

 patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested 

 the whole of her secret from Nature yet? It has looked 

 out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, 

 on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, 

 and now what a rich experience is its ! What says it 

 of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs ? It 

 would be worth while to look in the eye which has been 

 open and seeing at such hours and in such solitudes. 

 When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if 

 my own soul is not a bright, invisible green. I would 

 fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it. 



June 25, 1854. A green bittern, apparently, awk- 

 wardly alighting on the trees and uttering its hoarse, 

 zarry note, zskeow-zskeow-zskeow. 



July 12, 1854. I see a green bittern wading in a 

 shallow muddy place, with an awkward teetering, flut- 

 tering pace. 



Aug. 2, 1856. A green bittern comes, noiselessly 

 flapping, with stealthy and inquisitive looking to this 

 side the stream and then that, thirty feet above the 

 water. This antediluvian bird, creature of the night, is 

 a fit emblem of a dead stream like this Musketicook. * 

 This especially is the bird of the river. There is a sym- 

 pathy between its sluggish flight and the sluggish flow 

 of the stream, — its slowly lapsing flight, even like the 

 rills of Musketicook and my own pulse sometimes. 



1 [The Concord River. Musketaquid was the Indian name for Con- 

 cord. On his Maine woods excursion in 1853, Thoreau had asked 

 some Indians what it meant, " but they changed it to Musketicook, and 

 repeated that, and Tahmunt said that it meant Dead Stream, which is 



