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The crimson and gold of the dawn had softened and diffused into diaphanous mother-of-pearl mists of early day. The June morning miracle was complete and it was high time I allowed the oven bird to come back and be assured that her nest and eggs were safe.

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STALKING THE WILD GRAPE

IT was to be a moonlight night, yet the moon was on the wane and would not rise until eleven. It seemed as if the pasture birds missed the moon, or expected it, for beginning with the June dusk at eight o’clock one after another made brief queries from red cedar shelter or greenbrier thicket. One or two indeed insisted on pouring forth snatches of morning song, sending them questing through the darkness for several minutes, then ceasing as if ashamed of having been misled.

The cuckoo, of course, you may hear often on any warm night, springing his watchman’s rattle chuckle from the denser part of the thicket. But for the brown thrush to be announcing morning every half-hour through the darkness was an absurdity to be accounted for only on the theory that here was a gay young blood who was practising for a moonlight serenade. And when the moon did come, touching the tops of the pines first with a fine edging of gold, dropping a luminous benediction to the birches and diffusing it lower and lower till the whole pasture was gold and dusk, the ecstasy of the thrush knew no limit. He poured forth a perfect uproar of liquid melody, punctuated with such hurroos and whoops of delight that he made me wonder if his lady love would like such college-song methods of serenading.