BY WINTHROP PACKARD ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES COPELAND [Image unavailable.] BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1910 By Small, Maynard and Company (INCORPORATED) Entered at Stationers’ Hall THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally contributed to its columns....

T HE night was dark and bitter cold, though it was early March. Over in the dismal depths of Pigeon Swamp, where no pigeons have nested for nearly a half century though it is as wild and lone to-day as it was when they flocked there by thousands, a deep-toned, lonely cry resounded. It was like the fitful baying of a dog in the distance, only that it was too wild and eerie for that. Then there was silence for a space and an eldritch screech rang out. It was blood-curdling to a human listener, but

I HAVE been night-clerking a bit lately—social settlement work, you know—at the Pasture Pines Hotel, paying especial attention to the crow lodgers, and in so doing have come to the conclusion that in the last score or so of years the crows in my town have changed their habits. It used to be their custom to roost in flocks, winters. Over on the Wheeler place in the big pines you could find a rookery of several hundred of a winter evening, dropping in from all directions and making a perfect uproa

F OR two days the mad March winds have been blowing a fifty-mile gale, setting all the woodland crazy. No wonder the March hare is mad. He lives in Bedlam. No sooner does he squat comfortably in his form, his fair fat belly with round apple-tree bark lined, topped off with wee green sprigs of rash but succulent spring herbs from the brookside, ready to contemplate nature with all the philosophy which such a condition engenders, than the form rises in the air and its component leaves skitter thro

S OME time in the night the tender gray spring mists that the hot afternoon sun had coaxed up from all the meadowy places realized that they were deserted, lost in the darkness. The young moon had gone decorously to bed at nine o’clock, pulling certain cloud puffs of white down over even the tip of her nose, that she might not be tempted to come out and dance with these lovely pale creatures. They were dancing then, but later they trembled together in fright, for the kindly stars, their shining

T HE pond is a mile long, but it is shallow, with a level bottom that was once a peat meadow, and the water, holding some of this peat in solution, has a fine amber tinge. It is as if the sphagnums that wrought for ages in the bog and died to give it its black levels held in reserve vast stores of their own rich wine reds and mingled them with the yellows of hemlock heart-wood and the soft tan of marsh grasses that lie dead, all robed in funereal black at the pond bottom. By what mystery of alch

T O-DAY I remind myself forcibly of Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G. C., M. P. C., whose paper entitled “Speculations on the Sources of the Hampstead Ponds” was received with such enthusiasm on the part of the Pickwick Club, for I have made new discoveries of the sources of Ponkapog Pond. These are quite as astounding to me as were the Hampstead revelations to the Pickwick Club, and just as those sent Mr. Pickwick and his friends forth on new voyages, so these led me to a hitherto undiscovered country.

J UST as in midsummer the people of the little pasture and woodland hollows must envy those of the hilltop their cool, breezy outlook, so in mid-April the thought must be reversed. For still the warfare between the north wind and the sun which began in February skirmishes and reached its Gettysburg in late March, goes fitfully on, with Appomattox hardly in sight. The South is to win in this fratricidal struggle though, and in the summer millennium of peace and prosperity the two forces will join

A T nightfall the wind ceased, ashamed perhaps of its prolonged violence, and we felt the soft presence of April all about. Someone had suddenly wrapped the world in a protecting mantle of perfumed dreams. Hitherto it had been struggling to realize spring, succeeding here and there indeed, but always against cold disfavor and sullen opposition. Now, in a breath almost, joys and relaxation had come to all out-door creatures, and the air itself was suffused with tears of relief that brimmed over a

T HE first touch of the rose-gray morning air brought to my senses suspicion of two new delights; one, the more sensuously pleasing, to be sought, the other to be hoped for. It was easy to hope for things of such a morning, for there come gracious days in the very passing of April that presage all the seventh heaven of early June. At such times the pasture people bestir themselves, and no longer march sedately toward the full life of summer, but begin to riot and caper forward. The old Greek myt

A SPIRIT of mystery always broods over the great bog of Ponkapog Pond. Only occasionally does man disturb its quaking, sinking surface with his foot. You may wade all about on it, even to the edge where the billowing moss yields to the scarcely less stable pond surface; but to do so in safety you must know it intimately, else you will go down below, suddenly, to become a nodule in the peat, and perhaps be dug up intact a thousand years from now and put in a museum. Hence man rather shuns the bog

I T is fortunate that the angleworm is born without a voice, else throughout the length and breadth of the land were now resounding a chorus of doleful shrieks, for great is the dismemberment of angleworms about this time. The same warmth of imminent summer which made the grass jump six inches in length over night, has brought him forth in great numbers, over night also, for the angleworm is a lover of darkness. I know Darwin thought earthworm a more proper designation of him, but it is to be be

I T is a long time since I have set eyes, in broad daylight, upon the black-crowned night heron, often known as “quawk,” and otherwise derisively named by the impuritans. The scientists have also, it seems to me, joined in this derision, for they have dubbed him Nycticorax nycticorax nævius , which is a libel on his language. At any rate, it sounds like it. The roots are evidently the same. Yesterday, however, in broad daylight, I saw two pair sailing down out of the sunlit sky to light on a tre

O UT of the violet dusk of some June dawn you will see the summer coming over the hills from the south and you will know her from the spring at sight. I do not know how. I doubt if the whip-poor-will, who has a jealous eye on the dawn and its signs, for its first appearance means bedtime and surcease from labor for him, knows. Yet he feels her presence, for he waits it as a sign to select the spot for his nest. The whip-poor-will is hardly a home builder. He just occupies a flat for the summer,