Still, I trust I am betraying no confidence in making the matter
public here. I think this is preeminently his love-song, as I hear it
oftenest about the mating season. I have caught half-suppressed bursts
of it from two males chasing each other with fearful speed through the
forest.
Turning to the left from the old road, I wander over soft logs and
gray yielding debris, across the little trout brook, until I emerge in
the overgrown Barkpeeling,--pausing now and then on the way to admire
a small, solitary now and then on the way to admire a small, solitary
white flower which rises above the moss, with radical, heart-shaped
leaves, and a blossom precisely like the liverwort except in color,
but which is not put down in my botany,--or to observe the ferns, of
which I count six varieties, some gigantic ones nearly shoulder-high.
At the foot of a rough, scraggly yellow birch, on a bank of club-moss,
so richly inlaid with partridge-berry and curious shining
leaves--with here and there in the bordering a spire of false
wintergreen strung with faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath of
a May orchard--that it looks too costly a couch for such an idler, I
recline to note what transpires.
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