My own favorite I have saved until the very last. There is an unmatchable melody in the song of the hermit thrush found in that of no other bird. The olive-backed thrush has a hurried unrestful song, a combination of the notes of the wood thrush and the veery. I have never heard that mountain-top singer, the Bicknell thrush, or him of the far North, the gray-cheeked, or the varied thrush of the West, but from the description of their songs I doubt if any of them possess the qualities of the hermit. As I write, across the ice-bound months comes the memory of that spring twilight when I last heard the hermit thrush sing. I was leaning against the gnarled trunk of a great beech, between two buttressed roots. Overhead was a green mist of unfolding leaves, and the silver and gray light slowly faded between the bare white boles of the wood. A few creaking grackles rowed through the sky, and in the distance crows cawed on their way to some secret roost. Down through the air fell the alto sky-call of the bluebirds, and robins flocking for the night whispered greetings to each other. Below me the brook was full of voices. It tinkled and gurgled, and around the bend at intervals sounded a murmur so human that at first I thought some other wanderer had discovered my refuge. It was only, however, the mysterious babble that always sounds at intervals when a brook sings to a human. It was as if the water were trying to speak the listener's language, and had learned the tones but not the words. Now and again the wind sounded in the valley below; then passed overhead with a vast hollow roar, so high that the spice-bush thicket which hid me hardly swayed. I leaned back against the vast thews and ridged muscles of the beech, one of the generations upon generations of men who pass like dreams under its vast branches. One of my play-time fancies in the woods is to hark back a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years, and try to picture what trees and animals and men I might have met there then. Another is to choose the tree on which my life-years are to depend. Give up the human probabilities of life, and live as long or as short as the tree of my choice. Of course it would be a lottery. The tree might die, or be cut down, the year after I had made my bargain; and I used to plan how I would secure and guard the bit of woodland where my life-tree lived. Of all those that I met, this particular beech with the centuries behind it and the centuries yet to come, was my special choice, for the beech is the slowest growing of all our trees. This one towered high overhead, while its roots plunged down deep into the living waters and its vast girth seemed as if nothing could shake it.