Though these fine birds are generally described--one book following another, after the usual fashion--as frequenters of the wilderness, and though it is true that they have forsaken the more thickly settled parts of the country, I think I have never once seen them in the depths of the forest. To the best of my recollection none of our Franconia men have ever reported them from Mount Lafayette or from the Lonesome Lake region. On the other hand, we meet them with greater or less regularity in the more open valley woods, often directly upon the roadside; not only in the Landaff Valley, but on the outskirts of the village toward Littleton and on the Bethlehem road. In this latter place I remember seeing a fellow prancing about the trunk of a small orchard tree within twenty rods of a house; and not so very infrequently, especially in the rum-cherry season, they make their appearance in the immediate vicinity of the hotel; for they, like some of their relatives, notably the sapsucker, are true cherry-birds. In Vermont, too, I have found their freshly cut “peck-holes” on the very skirts of the village. And at the South, so far as I have been able to observe, the story is the same. About Natural Bridge, Virginia, for example, a loosely settled country, with plenty of woodland but no extensive forests, the birds were constantly in evidence. In short, untamable as they look, and little as they may like a town, they seem to find themselves best off, as birds in general do, on the borders of civilization. They have something of Thoreau’s mind, we may say: lovers of the wild, they are yet not quite at home in the wilderness, and prefer the woodman’s path to the logger’s. Not far ahead, on the other side of the way,--to return to the Landaff Valley,--is a _red_ maple grove, more brilliant even than the sugar orchards. It ripens its leaves earlier than they, as we have always noticed, and is already past the acme of its annual splendor; so that some of the trees have a peculiarly delicate and lovely purplish tint, a real bloom, never seen, I think, except on the red maple, and there only after the leaves have begun to curl and fade. Opposite it (after whistling in vain for a dog with whom in years past, I have been accustomed to be friendly at one of the houses--he must be dead, or gone, or grown reserved with age), I take the crossroad before mentioned; and now, face to face with Lafayette, I stop under a favorite pine tree to enjoy the prospect and the stillness: no sound but the chirping of crickets, the peeping of hylas, and the hardly less musical hammering of a distant carpenter.