their coming and going at the entrance to 
their retreat, or had "lined” them to this I 
tree; he had then laid open their rich treas¬ 
ures with the axe and had carried home 
who knows how many pounds of dripping 
comb. 
The sun was now nearing the meridian 
and it was borne in upon me that it was 
time to celebrate the noontide with due 
rites. For me too bees had been laboring in 
clover fields and the farmers of the Red Riv¬ 
er valley had grown golden wheat. The 
Shawsheen lay before me; what better place 
for a noonday meal of bread and honey. 
When thirsty I had but to stoop and drink 
the blue water of the river, fresh from the 
cranberry bogs of Bedford. 
While I sat at my lunch I had many 
visitors. A chicadee, making his way along 
the alders on the banks, stopped to cock his 
bright, black eye at me. A' flock of snow¬ 
birds came from a grove of pines and strag¬ 
gled ovjor the field behind me. Some stopped 
and sang to me. uttering not only their high , 
trill, always suggestive of early dawn on J 
the bare summits of the White Mountains. ! 
but also a little subdued medley, which j 
sounds as if the bird made it up as he went / 
along. A pair of swallows were playing s 
over the water or using the trolley wires i 
for perches. Two tree sparrows, the only 
: ones I saw all day, were taking a siesta in * 
{ the alders, and once the rumble of a car 
spurred a rusty blackbird to a single burst 
I of wheezy song, whether of protest or of 
j emulation. In the sandy field behind me 
I some white leathery fragments showed 
where a mammal, fox or skunk, had uncov¬ 
ered and eaten a clutch of turtle's eggs. 
Today, however, I could discover no inhabi¬ 
tants of the river larger than a water-boat- 
man. The river was going down, to judge 
from the line of brash along the bank. The 
numbers of small empty snailshells, most¬ 
ly of the round species (Planorbis) at high 
water mark was remarkable. Where I sat 
I counted over a hundred in a few square 
feet. What catastrophe had overtaken the 
species, or was this the normal yearly loss? 
Such a meal on s-ueh a day is one long 
to be remembered. When one spreads 
his table on the banks of a stream which 
lives up to a name like the Shawsheen, 
and has for choristers the first phoebes 
and swallows of the year, poorer fare 
than bread and honey would suffice. I 
have never tasted the far-famed honey i 
of Hybla, nor that which the Attic bees 
gathered from the purple slopes of Hy- 
mettus, but I know that it could not sur¬ 
pass in flavor the 'honey -of West Med¬ 
ford when eaten on the banks of the 
Shawsheen. 
In an old orchard, badly neglected 
from an apple-grower’s point of view, 
carefully tended from that of the blue¬ 
bird, a nuthatch was singing with a 
monotonous persistence. At last the se¬ 
cret of his iteration was revealed. A 
female nuthatch came out of a hollow 
limb with something—it might have been 
a chip—in her slender bill. I do not 
■know whether the nuthatch begins 
housekeeping as early as this. The fe¬ 
male, however, often lays as many as 
nine eggs; perhaps it behooves her to 
get an early start. 
As I neared the foot of the hill on 
1 which I supposed the village of Burllng- 
I ton was perched 1 saw two men coming 
down a hillside to the road. One was 
without a coat and carried an axe; the 
other had a small blue agate saucepan 
in his hand. At first I was puzzled to 
account for the dish, but I finally made 
up my mind that the ■pair had been mend¬ 
ing fences, and that the saucepan con¬ 
tained nails. The man with the axe had 
a spare, bent figure, a shrewd and hu¬ 
morous eye; his companion had the 
' shambling gait, the jrfild eye and un- 
trimmed beard of the feeble-minded. De¬ 
termined to verify my guess, I waited 
for them to reach the road, and then 
walked over till I was near enough to 
see that I had come dose to the truth. 
It was wire fences that they had been 
mending, and the saucepan contained the 
staples. , wv. 
To cover my curiosity I asked how 
far it was to Burlington. The man with 
the axe assured me that I was “pooty 
nigh in the middle of Burlington.” On 
my answering that I wanted to get on 
top of Burlington, he said: “You ’re quite 
high-minded to want to climb that hill.” 
Our acquaintance having been thus begun, 
we talked, for some time, leaning against 
the bars and luxuriating in the warm 
sun. I asked whether his solicitude for 
the fences meant that he had turned his 
stock out already. “Yes,” he said, “I 
turned ’em out today to kind of air ’em,” 
I found that for twenty years he and his 
wife had been managing almshouses. He 
told me that the inmates of these institu¬ 
tions lived as well as he or I did, except 
for the foolish interference of the State, 
which demands that each new inmate shall 
be given a bath on his admission. “Now, 
when some old feller has gone mebbe seven¬ 
ty or eighty year without takin’ a bath, it’s 
against natur’ to begin on him then,” he 
said. I ventured the opinion that if it had 
gone so long, it might be high time to begin. 
He allowed that there might be that point 
of view, but he backed up his opinion by an 
account of his experience with a newly ar¬ 
rived lodger. The State inspector had in¬ 
sisted on his giving the poor victim the 
official hath, but the sight of the bath-tub’ 
half full of water had “scat him nigh to 
death.” "He thot I was going to drown him; 
I regularly had to cast him like a horse. 
But when he seen that it done him no harm, 
he quit strugglin’.” 
Between Burlington and Winchester the 
road passes over a fairly high ridge, and 
descends into a little valley, where for a 
moment one could imagine oneself in the 
Berkshires. It is almost a mountain gorge, 
shaded by tall oaks and pines. A phoebe (I 
had seen six in all) was calling in a little 
sunny opening. There was no house in sight. 
Perhaps the phoebe still built in ancestral 
fashion, on the ledges of the cliff past which 
the road wound. Across the valley rose 
Zion’s Hill in Winchester. As I climbed it, 
at about five o'clock, the slant sun was still 
pouring a flood of light over all the valley 
below. Crows had been passing north all 
the afternoon, in companies of forty, fifty 
and even a long line of seventy-five. From 
the brow of the hill I got a hint of the scene 
which must spread itself-out to anyone wh<? 
could travel as the crows flies. In the pal* 
west rose the Peterboro hills and the great 
buikofWachusett. To the north stretched the 
broad valley of the Shawsheen, along which 
perhaps, in pre-glacial times, some broad 
stream descended from the north. Now it 
