If the forenoon had been indolent, the noonday hour was more so. I descended the hill by a way different from any I had yet taken, and found myself at the foot in a public road running through a cultivated valley. The day was peculiarly comfortable, with a bright sun and a temperate breeze,--ideal weather for such inactivities as I was engaged in. Coming to an old cherry-tree, I rested awhile in its shadow. A farmhouse was not far off, with apple-trees before it, a barn across the way, and two or three men at work in the sloping ploughed field beyond. To one as lazy as I then was, it is almost a luxury to see other men hoeing or ploughing, so they be far enough off to become a part of the landscape. Near the barn stood a venerable weeping willow, huge of girth, a very patriarch, yet still green as youth itself. Here were good farm-loving birds, a pleasant society. A pair of house wrens came at once to look at the stranger, and one of them interested me by dusting itself in the road. Two kingbirds were about the apple-trees (apple-tree flycatchers would be my name for them, if a name were in order), now sitting quiet for a brief space, now scaling the heavens, as if to see how nearly perpendicular a bird’s flight could be made, and then tumbling about ecstatically with rapid vociferations, after the half-crazy manner of their kind. The kingbird is plentifully endowed not only with spirit, but with spirits. A goldfinch sang and twittered in the softest voice, and a catbird mewed. From a quince bush, a little farther off, a wild bobolinkian strain was repeated again and again,--an orchard oriole, I thought most likely. I went nearer (to the shade of a low cedar), and soon had him in sight,--a young male in yellow plumage, with a black throat-patch. The song was extremely taking, and the more I heard it, the more it seemed to have the true bobolink ring. The quince bushes were in pale pink bloom, and the branches of a tall snowball-tree in the unfenced front yard of the house fairly drooped under their load of white globular clusters. Just opposite was a sweet-brier bush, “the pastoral eglantine,” half dead like others that I had noticed here, and like the whole tribe of its New England brothers and sisters. Here as in Massachusetts a blight was upon them; they were living with difficulty. It would be good, I thought, to see the sweet-brier once where it flourishes; where the beauty of the plant matches the beauty and sweetness of the rose it bears. Can it be that it is not quite hardy even in Virginia?