again I saw him there preening his feathers, and once or twice I tried to inveigle him into betraying his secret. Either his house was further off than I suspected, however, or else he was too cunning to fall into my snare. At any rate, he permitted me to trample all about the spot, without manifesting the first symptom of uneasiness. What a traveler the humming-bird is! I myself had come perhaps three hundred miles, and had accounted it a long, tiresome journey, notwithstanding I had been brought nearly all the way in a carriage elaborately contrived for comfort, and moving over iron rails. But this tiny insect-like creature spent last winter in Central America, or it may be in Cuba, and now here he sat, perfectly at home again in this Green Mountain nook; and next autumn he will be off again betimes, as the merest matter of course, for another thousand-mile flight. Verily, a marvelous spirit and energy may be contained within a few ounces of flesh! But if Trochilus be indeed Prospero's servant in disguise, as one of our poets makes out, why, then, to be sure, his flittings back and forth are little to wonder at. How slow, overgrown, and clumsy human beings must look in his eyes! I wonder if he is never tempted to laugh at us. Who knows but humming-birds have it for a by-word, "As awkward as a man"? My ruminations were suddenly broken in upon by the approach of a carriage, driven by a boy of perhaps ten years, a son of the farmer from whose land I was, as it were, gathering the first fruits. We had made each other's acquaintance the day before, and now, as he surmounted the hill, he stopped to inquire politely whether I would ride with him. Yes, I answered, I would gladly be carried into the forest a little way. It proved a very little way indeed; for the road was heavy from recent rains, and the poor old hack was so short of breath that he could barely drag us along, and at every slump of the wheels came to a dead standstill. "Pity for a horse o'er-driven" soon compelled me to take to the woods, in spite of the protestations of my charioteer, who assured me that his steed _could_ trot "like everything," if he only would. It is an extremely unpatriotic Vermonter, I suspect (I have never yet discovered him), who will not brag a little over his horse; and I was rather pleased than otherwise to hear my flaxen-haired friend set forth the good points of his beast, even while he confessed that the "heaves" were pretty bad. I was glad, too, to find the youngster in a general way something of an optimist. When I asked him how long the land had been cleared, he pointed to one corner of it, and responded, using the pronoun with perfect _naïveté_, "We cleared up that piece last fall;" and on my inquiring whether it was not hard work, he replied, in a tone of absolute satisfaction, "Oh, yes, but you get your pay for it." Evidently he believed in Green Mountain land, which I thought a very fortunate circumstance.