THE BEAK-FIELD. 
173 
few have found them; graceful and slender like rip¬ 
ples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by 
the wind to float in the heavens ; such kindredship is in 
Nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which 
he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated 
wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of 
the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks 
circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descend¬ 
ing, approaching and leaving one another, as if they 
were the imbodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was 
attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood 
to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and 
carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe 
turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted 
salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our con¬ 
temporary. When I paused to lean on r ly hoe, these 
sounds and sights I heard and saw any where in the 
row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which 
the country offers. 
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which 
echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of 
martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, 
away there in my bean-field at the other end of the 
town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; 
and when there was a military turnout of which I was 
ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the 
day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, 
as if some eruption would break out there soon, either 
scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more 
favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and 
up the Wayland road, brought me information of the 
66 trainers.” It seemed by the distant hum as if some¬ 
body’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, 
