THE HERMIT OF THE WOOD. 



From childhood I have been familiar with the " di- 

 vine soprano" of the hermit thrush, the song which 

 John Burroughs calls the finest sound in Nature. I 

 think we never drove through the Dark Plains on a 

 quiet summer afternoon that we did not hear this 

 chime of silver bells amid the tops of the murmuring 

 pines. But I was always told that it was hopeless to 

 look for the bird. My father and my uncle, both 

 woodsmen, said that they had searched for hours to 

 find the source of this heavenly music, but that the 

 bird was the shyest of all feathered creatures and was 

 never seen. I grew up with the idea that, like Words- 

 worth's Cuckoo, he was not bird at all, but a wander- 

 ing voice. There seemed something appropriate in 

 this mystery and seclusion, for there is a peculiarly 

 spiritual quality about the music; and when several 

 hermits were singing in the pines, as they always were 

 on Sunday afternoons, it seemed like an angelic choir 

 in the dim aisles of a cathedral. 



Of late years since I have learned the possibilities 

 of an opera-glass, and that even an amateur who keeps 

 his eyes open may expect to find anything anywhere, 



