The lifeless dun of the close-cropped southward slopes and the tawny
tangles of the swales are kindling to living green with the blaze of the
sun and the moist tinder of the brook's overflow.
The faithful swallows have returned, though the faithless season delays.
The flicker flashes his golden shafts in the sunlight and gladdens the
ear with his merry cackle. The upland plover wails his greeting to the
tussocked pastures, where day and night rings the shrill chorus of the
hylas and the trill of the toads continually trembles in the soft air.
The first comers of the birds are already mated and nest-building, robin
and song sparrow each in his chosen place setting the foundations of his
house with mud or threads of dry grass. The crow clutters out his
softest love note. The flicker is mining a fortress in the heart of an
old apple-tree.
The squirrels wind a swift ruddy chain about a boll in their love chase,
and even now you may surprise the vixen fox watching the first gambols
of her tawny cubs by the sunny border of the woods.
The gray haze of undergrowth and lofty ramage is turning to a misty
green, and the shadows of opening buds knot the meshed shadows of twigs
on the brown forest floor, which is splashed with white moose-flowers
and buds of bloodroot, like ivory-tipped arrows, each in a green quiver,
and yellow adder-tongues bending above their mottled beds, and rusty
trails of arbutus leaves leading to the secret of their hidden bloom,
which their fragrance half betrays.
Marsh marigolds lengthen their golden chain, link by link, along the
ditches. The maples are yellow with paler bloom, and the graceful
birches are bent with their light burden of tassels. The dandelion
answers the sun, the violet the sky. Blossom and greenness are
everywhere; even the brown paths of the plough and harrow are greening
with springing grain.
We listen to the cuckoo's monotonous flute among the white drifts of
orchard bloom and the incessant murmur of bees, the oriole's half
plaintive carol as of departed joys in the elms, and the jubilant song
of the bobolink in the meadows, where he is not an outlaw but a welcome
guest, mingling his glad notes with the merry voices of flower-gathering
children, as by and by he will with the ringing cadence of the scythe
and the vibrant chirr of the mower. Down by the flooded marshes the
scarlet of the water maples and the flash of the starling's wing are
repeated in the broad mirror of the still water. The turtle basks on the
long incline of stranded logs.
Tally-sticks cast adrift are a symbol that the trapper's warfare against
the muskrats is ended and that the decimated remnant of the tribe is
left in peace to reestablish itself. The spendthrift waste of untimely
shooting is stayed. Wild duck, plover, and snipe have entered upon the
enjoyment of a summer truce that will be unbroken, if the collector is
not abroad at whose hands science ruthlessly demands mating birds and
callow brood.
Of all sportsmen only the angler, often attended by his winged brother
the kingfisher, is astir, wandering by pleasant waters where the bass
lurks in the tangles of an eddy's writhing currents, or the perch poises
and then glides through the intangible golden meshes that waves and
sunlight knit, or where the trout lies poised beneath the silver domes
of foam bells.
The loon laughs again on the lake. Again the freed waves toss the
shadows of the shores and the white reflections of white sails, and
flash back the sunlight or the glitter of stars and the beacon's
rekindled gleam.
Sun and sky, forest, field, and water, bird and blossom, declare the
fullness of spring and the coming of summer.