The crows kept telling me the glad news, “Spring has come!” all the time I was dressing, and it was echoed in the tufted tit’s questioning note when he flew round the house to his breakfast on the window sill. When I started out for my morning walk the very air seemed filled with tiny voices proclaiming the good tidings.
I had not gone far before I heard a cardinal singing gloriously, his song answering the one in my own heart; and the theme was ever, “Spring has come!”
But the crowning surprise and joy of all came when I had reached the brook pasture. I stopped, listened and caught my breath; could it be on the 27th of February? Yes, a song sparrow! No one who is unacquainted with the purity and simple charm of this bird’s song, which breathes of all that is fair and good, can understand or appreciate the rapture I felt upon hearing it again this morning. Going on a little farther I heard another song sparrow; the two were singing by turns, answering each other in sweetest melody. One could scarcely wait until the other had finished his strain, so eager were they to pour out the good news.
Oh, if you who are tired or dull indoors will only go out these mornings and fill your lungs with the pure air of heaven and your hearts with the rapture of spring, how many of your cares will drop away! Nature’s myriad voices will talk to you if you will listen; the birds will sing to you the sweetest music in the world—God’s love in melody.
This joy in the beauties of Nature may be yours if you will; do not allow such a precious gift to escape you. It is beyond price, yet free to all. Each year adds to the wonder and value of Nature’s treasures; they are ever new, ever more and more welcome with each returning season. Happy are they who know and love them well.
Anne Wakely Jackson.
FROM AN ORNITHOLOGIST’S YEAR BOOK.
FLUTE OF ARCADY.
In Ohio are many wide, grassy fields, covering the rounded hillslopes or filling open valleys. One day in March the world was white with snow, and I heard, as if in a dream, the soft cooing of the doves. Never before had I heard it except on sunny afternoons in pine woods, rich with warm, resinous odors. It is hardly a sound—rather silence perceptible, blending so perfectly with the sunshine, the hushed and brooding stillness of the air, the half-conscious sense of life, that I would often hear it a long while without knowing that I listened—the soft, tremulous cooing of the wood-doves, yet here the earth was white with snow and the air chill.
But the doves were right. Spring was near, and in a little while the feathery grass was nodding in the warm wind, gray and hazy, as the great white clouds swept overhead with wing-like shadows, or shining, each tiny blade like burnished steel, in the sunlight. The cooing of the doves had been only a low prelude; now the air was ringing with melody.
“N’er a leaf was dumb;