The building interested me almost as much as the sandpipers and the sparrows. It was painted red, and served not only as a mill, but as a post-office (“Red Mills”) and a “department store,” with its sign, “Dry Goods, Groceries, &c.” A tablet informed the passer-by that the mill had been “established” in 1798, destroyed in 1881, and reopened in 1891; and on the same tablet, or another, was the motto, “Laborare est orare.” I regretted not to meet the proprietor, but he was nowhere in sight, and I felt a scruple about intruding upon the time of a man who was at once postmaster, miller, farmer, storekeeper, and scholar. With that motto before me,--“Apologia pro vita sua,” he might have called it,--such an intrusion would have seemed a sacrilege. What I remember best about the whole establishment is the song of a blue-gray gnatcatcher, to which I stopped to listen under a low savin-tree on a bluff above the mill. He was directly over my head, singing somewhat in the manner of a catbird, but I had almost to hold my breath to hear him. It was amazing that a bird’s voice could be spun so fine. A mere shadow of a sound, I was ready to say. It was only by the happiest accident that I did not miss it altogether. Then, when the fellow had finished his music, he began squeaking in that peculiarly teasing manner of his, and kept it up till I was weary. The gnatcatcher is a creature by himself, a miniature bird, wonderfully slender, with a strangely long tail, which he carries jauntily and makes the most of on all occasions. But if he only knew it, his chief claim to distinction is his singing voice. If the humming-bird’s is attenuated in the same proportion (and who can assert the contrary?), he may be the finest vocalist in the world, and we none the wiser.