i wy 
THE ATLANTIC ALMANAC FOR 1869. 25 
motion, and seems often to court the society of those it trusts, 
approaching you with a familiarity that is irresistible. To attract 
your attention it will resort to a great variety of positions and 
attitudes, uniting these with its best musical efforts. The Capitol 
grounds in Washington, before the enlargement of the building, 
‘used to abound with these birds, and their familiarity and charm- 
ing songs were among the chief attractions of the place. No 
petted opera-singer ever seemed more ambitious of the approval 
of her audience than did these indefatigable performers, descend- 
ing often to the lowest boughs, within a few feet of one’s head, 
and devoting their best energies to the entertainment of those 
who seemed attracted towards them. 
We might extend indefinitely our mention of the more note- 
worthy song-birds; but we have already exceeded our limits. 
The Bobolink, and its kindred of stout-billed graminivorous sing- 
ers, —the linnets, the song-sparrows, and the curious White- 
throated Finch (the Peabody Bird of the White Mountains), — 
must bide their time. The wrens too, the vireos, the meadow 
larks, and a host of unmentioned songsters, equal in sweetness, 
melody, and power to those whose excellences we have inade- 
quately portrayed, we shall hope to introduce to our readers at 
some future day. 
BROOKSIDE. 
By tHE Eprror. 
OOKS are summer comforters ; not Brooks of Sheffield (vide 
Copperfield), nor any other mere human babblers ; but brooks 
that ae te silvery voices from the hillsides, and change 
them to a sweet, mellow, tremulous sound, as they loiter away 
through the gra meads. There are brooks with good names, 
—such as Roaring as and Bound Brook and Stony Brook 
and Red Brook (mad 
yet I doubt if the best breok of all is not a brook without/a 
name, or rather a brook so “hear and so companionable and so 
loved, that it has lost its name by stress of intimacy with its’prat-, 
tle and its flow and its silver sheen, Se that to us who know it so 
well, a name (whatever it may be) wears a cold, ceremonious 
twang, and we think of it only as — The brook. There are riv- 
ers, I know, which to those who live close upoisthetr banks have 
lost whatever name the geographers may have, given, and 
are talked of and apostrophized and remembered only — each 
one of them—as The River. A brook will grow into much 
nearer companionship, if so be we can command both the hith- 
er and the thither banks, and thus coutit it a possession. No. 
dweller upon the shore of a great rivet can come to this feeling, 
whatever love he may lend to the glory of the water. Unknown 
neighbors are partners in ownership, and the vulgar keels of 
reckless boatmen may ruffle its bosom. But the brook, on 
which the shadows of your tregs fall in the morning and fall again 
in the afternoon, is at once a-possession and a joy; all the better, 
if so small that no prowling skiff can force a way over its shal- 
lows, and violate its maidenly seclusion. 
It must be now twenty years or more since I laid eyes upon 
that gleam of meadov water which, stealing through coppice and 
through marsh graégses, told its silver story of Tur Broo, —the 
brook that has “tempted this impassioned praise, — the brook 
where first a/line was wetted,— the brook where in June (its 
earliest warm day) the sheep came winding from the hillside by 
unaccustomhed ways, frighted by the shouts and looking as- 
newly opened barriers, questioning the intrusion, 
involved and tumultuous effort for a return, until some 
id wether made a frolicsome leap into the new territory, 
kance 
maki 
wHen the whole flock came plunging after, and on through other 
the green case-bottle of “ black-strap” 
nctuous by the trout killed there) ; but mixture of rum and molasses), with which Old Si. (ordinarily a 
barriers and by wooded lanes, until at last all were closely kempt 
in the little yard which with poles and hickory withes had been 
extemporized upon the very edge of the brook, and beside oné of 
its deepest pools. 
Through twenty years I hear the bleating of those score of 
lambs, bewildered, and trotting uneasily back and fort, through 
and around the hurdles which shut in the ewes. ‘Their turn for 
a washing, or of such of them as may escape the“butcher, does 
not come until the next season. Through twenty years and all 
the mists of them, I see the old maple, with riggy roots stretched 
like knotted sinews into the soft sward-land,of the bank, and its 
great top, in all the glory of its first June leafage, leaning over 
the water. I see the eddies and the swirl as the brook comes 
swooping round a tuft of gray alders fvhere a red-winged black- 
bird has just now shown a flash of his crimson epaulets; from a 
tall hickory on the farther bank, ard, hidden in its dense foliage, 
a lithe, trim cuckoo gives out a monotonous croak of rain ; 
“ And I canfisten to thee yet, 
Can lie upon the plain, 
And ligten till I do beget 
That golden time again” ; 
f 
a pair of Phoebe birds, whose nest is under the plank bridge 
where the high-road/crosses two rods away, flit in and out; a 
broad, shallow pool through which country folk drive their teams, 
and where mare and foal, with bent necks and forearm shortened, 
rejoice in the fectar of the water ; two turtles with outstretched 
heads, who ate sunning themselves upon a half-sunken log, sidle 
lazily off and “plump” into the stream, as the mare and foal 
come splashing through. All this I see across twenty years, and 
see the blue haze that enwraps the distant woods, and elms en- 
folding a gray roof toward which a half-mile of path lies straight 
across the meadows. Through twenty years I can almost scent 
(being some mysterious 
temperance man) thinks it needful to fortify himself against the 
chillness of the June waters and the soak of his sheep-washing. 
There were those in the neighborhood, indeed, who avoided 
this souse into the brook, by driving their flock to a mill-dam 
not far away, where the trunk of a waste-way from the pond gave 
a three-foot fall of water, under which the struggling victims were 
held and the fleece squeezed ; but this was an imperfect and slip- 
shod way; Old Si. would not listen to it; it did n’t half do the 
work; he had sheared some of “ them” sheep turned out at the 
mill-dam, and their fleeces were full of “‘ pesky grit.” There was 
nothing, he said, like a good broad pool which would take a man 
to his agar with a good shade over it, —“ the like o’ this ’ere 
inaple, now,” —and quick water running away from the lower 
edgdvof the pool to carry off the “suds.” “Then,” said he, “ you 
don’t Want to be hash in handlin’ on ’em; a sheep ’s a tender 
crittur. You don’t want to torment ’em by puttin’ their noses 
under ; ‘aint wants his nose hild under water? Wial, 
don’t you s’pose sheep ’s got feelin’ tew? You want to float ’em 
out easy to where the water jist begins to roughen a bit with 
the run down stream, then press the fleece all over, inch by inch, 
as you would a sponge, and _you’ve got a fleece, arter a little, 
that won’t dull no man’s shears? 
Sheep-washing appears a delightful matter in a picture ; but to 
stand waist-deep, for two or three hours together, in a brook that has 
had only a few June days to warm it, without the privilege of that 
constant, eager motion and change of position which relieve the 
angler, is a seriously chilling thing, and one which would almost ex- 
cuse a resort —if anything might — to the green case-bottle that 
lies under the bush. It is only another type of the exceeding great 
contrasts which exist between pastorals on paper and pastorals in 
earnest. ‘Take the labor and the exposures and the dirt and the 
