To get all the goodness out of a piece of country, return to it again and again, till every corner of it is alive with memories; but do not see it too often, nor make your stay in it too long. The hermit thrush’s voice is all the sweeter because he _is_ a hermit. This afternoon I do not cross the bridge, but keep to the valley road, which soon runs for some distance along the edge of a hackmatack swamp; full of graceful, pencil-tipped, feathery trees, with here and there a dead one, on purpose for woodpeckers and hawks. A hairy woodpecker is on one of them at this moment, now hammering the trunk with his powerful beak (hammer and chisel in one), now lifting up his voice in a way to be heard for half a mile. To judge from his ordinary tone and manner, _Dryobates villosus_ has no need to cultivate decision of character. Every word is peremptory, and every action speaks of energy and a mind made up. In this larch swamp, though I have never really explored it, I have seen, first and last, a good many things. Here grows much of the pear-leaved willow (_Salix balsamifera_). I notice a few bushes even now as I pass, the reddish twigs each with a tuft of yellowing, red-stemmed leaves at the tip. Here, one June, a Tennessee warbler sang to me; and there are only two other places in the world in which I have been thus favored. Here,--a little farther up the valley,--on a rainy September forenoon, I once sat for an hour in the midst of as pretty a flock of birds as a man could wish to see: south-going travelers of many sorts, whom the fortunes of the road had thrown together. Here they were, lying by for a day’s rest in this favorable spot; flitting to and fro, chirping, singing, feeding, playfully quarreling, as if life, even in rainy weather and in migration time, were all a pleasure trip. It was a sight to cure low spirits. I sat on the hay just within the open side of a barn which stands here in the woods, quite by itself, and watched them till I almost felt myself of their company. I have forgotten their names, though I listed them carefully enough, beyond a doubt; but it will be long before I forget my delight in the birds themselves. Ours may be an evil world, as the pessimists and the preachers find so much comfort in maintaining, but there is one thing to be said in its favor: its happy days are the longest remembered. The pain I suffered years ago I cannot any longer make real to myself, even if I would, but the joys of that time are still almost as good as new, when occasion calls them up. Some of them, indeed, seem to have sweetened with age. This is especially the case, I think, with simple and natural pleasures; which may be considered as a good reason why every man should be, if he can, a lover of nature,--a sympathizer, that is to say, with the life of the world about him. The less artificial our joys, the more likelihood of their staying by us.