116 AT THE NORTH OF BEARCAMP WATER . 
It was not until nearly six o’clock that the 
tree became really populous again. Then the 
catbirds went upstairs on its branches, flickers 
and kingbirds occupied its top; a humming-bird 
buzzed in the face of a pewee who was perched 
fully thirty feet from the ground; a sapsucking 
woodpecker came and drummed for a moment, 
and finally a flock of cedar-birds rested in it for 
a while as they had in the morning. The sun set 
and night breathed upon the meadow. A single 
cedar-bird remained in the tip of the tree and 
drearily repeated his one dismal word. Below 
in the shadows the catbirds were restlessly 
mewing, and as it grew dark the lament of the 
hermits joined in the gloomy chorus. The sky 
was fair, and rosy lights flowed and ebbed in 
the clouds. The stars came, and in the distant 
pines a barred owl sounded his long trumpet 
note. A few minutes after seven, when cat¬ 
birds and hermits were silent for the night, I 
heard a solitary sandpiper whistling at the 
mouth of the brook. My glass brought his tiny 
form to view, and as I watched him, a second 
tattler ran along the gleaming sand and the 
whistling ceased. Suddenly they flew together 
as though startled, and the next moment I saw 
what I had supposed to be a bunch of pickerel- 
weed growing in the shallows move slowly east¬ 
ward. The object was several rods from the 
