How well, too, I recall the cuckoos that, night or day, intoned so moodily in the willow copses below the east field fence and suffered from a like unpopular accusation of "laying their eggs in other birds' nests." Also the mated triads of sooty chimney swallows that rumbled nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most surely lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp cries and concave stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree, tapping this one loudly, that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in the dead maple on the hillside was re-occupied year after year, till at last the stub blew down and broke short off at the hole itself; the king-fishers that with the same stooping flight, sprung their sharp rattles along the brooks and lakeside; the martins that feloniously caught the bees, and every season dragged their squalling, screaming young out of their pole-house, then poked them off the platform to fly for themselves, having first, however, cleared the yard of cats.
The militant king birds, too, that built every June on the tops of the small apple-trees in the young orchard, and raged in mid air, overhead, pouring out a wild farago of sharp cries, never so happy as when in full career after crows, hawks, cats or dogs; the moth-catching night-hawks that cried peerk from their wide mouths, high in the sky at nightfall, and dived far aslant on stiff wings, with a long drawn soo-oo-ook; the clucking whip-poor-wills, that chanted from the bare flat pasture rocks; the chickadees that came into the orchard and about the great loose farm woodpile, in February, with their odd little minor refrain of cic-a-da-da-da-da, mere feathery mites of ceaseless activity that somehow did not freeze, at 20° below zero.
In this freezing weather, too, came the white-winged flocks of snow-buntings, that heralded the coming storm and flew away, blending with the whirling snowflakes, uttering queer thin notes that seemed like spirit voices from the upper air: all these and many others, Nature's humble angels, what part and parcel they were of that dear old farm life of ours!
Nor yet have I mentioned the larger game birds, nor the birds of prey; the "hoot-owls" that both in summer and winter, but oftenest in March and October, on still, dark, cloudy evenings, uttered their dismal, deep bass hoot, hoot, hoo-oo-oot, from the depths of the gloomy forest side, beyond the Little Sea; the hen-hawks that cried down chickee-ee to us, from endless mazy circles high over the farm, and occasionally decimated the poultry, or were seen sailing low across the fields with a snake dangling from their claws; the eagles that seldom, but on a few occasions paid a brief visit to the vicinity; the herons that frogged along the boggy shore of the lake and built their nests in the tops of the Foy Brook pines; the wild geese that flew northward in a wide V, early in the spring and again southward in October; the sheldrake and the black ducks which Addison had such success shooting every fall, in the old mill pond, beyond the east wood-lot; the swift-diving loons of the blue Pennesseewassee, that flew heavily across the hills, to several northerly ponds, uttering shaken, hollow cries, or that in the early evening and morning hours, pealed their mellow, alto horns from the calm bosom of the lake; the partridges that "drummed" in the outlying copses and patches of second growth, in April, and led forth their broods in June, subject every autumn to our first excited, early efforts at gunning; and last of all, the flapping, canny, thievish, black crows that like the foxes were always about, and always at loggerheads with the farmers.
CHAPTER XII
TWO VERY EARLY CALLERS—EACH ON BUSINESS
Except on Sunday mornings, breakfast at the farm in summer came at six. The Old Squire himself was often astir at four; and we boys were supposed to get up at five, so as to have milking done and other barn chores off, ready to go into the field from the breakfast table. Gram and the girls also rose at five, to get breakfast, take care of the milk and look after the poultry. Everybody, in fact, rose with the birds in that rural community. But often I was scarcely more than half awake at breakfast; Ellen and Wealthy, too, were in much the same case.