Not to blink at the truth, nevertheless, I must add a circumstance which, till this moment, I had clean forgotten. I was still watching the birds, with perhaps a dozen species in sight close at hand, when suddenly I observed a something come over them, and on the instant a large hawk skimmed the tops of the trees. In one second every bird was gone,--vanished, as if at the touch of a necromancer’s wand. I did not see them fly; there was no rush of wings; but the place was empty; and though I waited for them, they did not reappear. Two or three, indeed, I may have seen afterward, but the flock was gone. _My_ holiday, at all events, or that part of it, was done,--shadowed by a hawk’s wing. Undoubtedly a few minutes of safety put the birds all in comfortable spirits again, however; and anyhow, it bears out my theory of remembered happiness, that this less cheerful part of the story had so completely passed out of mind. Memory, like a sundial, had marked only the bright hour. Beyond this lonely barn the soil of the valley becomes drier and sandier. Here are two or three houses, with broad hayfields about them, in which live many vesper sparrows. No doubt they have lived here longer than any of their present human neighbors. Even now they flit along the wayside in advance of the foot-passenger, running a space, after their manner, and anon taking wing to alight upon a fence rail. Their year is done, but they linger still a few days, out of love for the ancestral fields, or, it may be, in dread of the long journey, from which some of them will pretty certainly never come back. All the way up the road, though no mention has been made of it, my eyes have been upon the low, bright-colored hills beyond the river,--sugar-maple orchards all in yellow and red, a gorgeous display,--or upon the mountains in front, Kinsman and the more distant Moosilauke. The green meadow is a good place in which to look for marsh hawks,--as well as of great use as a foreground,--and the hill woods beyond are the resort of pileated woodpeckers. I have often seen and heard them here, but there is no sign of them to-day.