IN THE BLACK RIVER COUNTRY.
Where shall we keep the holiday?
Up and away! where haughty woods
Front the liberated floods:
We will climb the broad-backed hills,
Hear the uproar of their joy;
We will mark the leaps and gleams
Of the new-delivered streams,
And the murmuring river of sap
Mount in the pipes of the trees.
And the colors of joy in the bird
And the love in his carol heard.
Frog and lizard in holiday coats,
And turtle brave in his golden spots.
Emerson.
IX.
THAT WITCHING SONG.
A year or two before setting up my tent in the Black River Country, began my acquaintance with the author of the witching song.
The time was evening; the place, the veranda of a friend's summer cottage at Lake George. The vireo and the redstart had ceased their songs; the cat-bird had flirted "good-night" from the fence; even the robin, last of all to go to bed, had uttered his final peep and vanished from sight and hearing; the sun had gone down behind the mountains across the lake, and I was listening for the whippoorwill who lived at the edge of the wood to take up the burden of song and carry it into the night.