A squirrel, clinging to the bark of a tree near by, watched us with his bright eyes.
"Chuck, chuck." A bird on a branch overhead broke the silence, and, with a flutter of his wings, was gone. And now from far away, like the voice of Summer herself, filled with unutterable drowsiness and laziness and content, came the wood-dove's song to the mysterious Susie:
"Don't cry so, Susie—don't cry so, Susie—don't cry so, Susie. Don't!"
"And listen!" said Eloise, when the wood-dove's song had been wiped away by silence and replaced by a "tap, tap, tap," far off, reiterated and decided, curiously contrasting with the less businesslike sounds of the wood.
"That's a woodpecker," I said. "Isn't he going it? And listen! That's a jay."
Then the whole wood sang to the breeze that had suddenly freshened, the light flashed and danced through the dancing leaves, the trees for a moment seemed to shake off the indolence of summer, and the forest of Sénart spoke—spoke from its cavernous bosom, where the pine-trees spread the hollow ground, from the pools where the bulrushes whispered, from the beech-glades and the nut-groves. The oaks, old as the time of Charles IX., the willows of yesterday, the elms all a-drone with bees, and the poplars paling to the trumpet-call of the wind, all joined their voices in one divine chorus:
"I am the forest of Sénart, old as the history of France, yet young as the last green leaf that April has pinned to my robe. Rejoice with me, for the skies are blue again, the hawthorn blooms, the birds have found their nests, the old, old world is young once more. For it is May."
"It is May; it is May!" came the carol of the birds, freshening to life with the dying wind.
Then we went on our road, Eloise with her hands filled with freshly gathered violets.
I thought I knew the forest and the direction to take for the great pool; but we had not gone far when our path branched, and for my life I could not tell which to take.