First, however, I must train my glass upon a certain dark object out in the meadow, to see whether it was a stump (it was motionless enough for one, but I didn’t remember it there) or a woodchuck. It turned out to be a woodchuck, erect upon his haunches, his fore paws lifted in an attitude of devotion. The sight was common just now in all Franconia grass land, no matter in what direction my jaunts took me. And always the attitude was the same, as if now were the ground-hog’s Lent. “Watch and pray” is his motto; and he thrives upon it like a monk. Though the legislature sets a price on his head, he keeps in better flesh than the average legislator. Well done, say I. May his shadow never grow less! I like him, as I like the crow. Health and long life to both of them,--wildings that will not be put down nor driven into the outer wilderness, be the hand of civilization never so hostile. They were here before man came, and will be here, it is most likely, after he is gone; unless, as the old planet’s fires go out, man himself becomes a hibernator. I have heard a hunted woodchuck, at bay in a stone wall, gnashing his teeth against a dog; and I have seen a mother woodchuck with a litter of young ones playing about her as she lay at full length sunning herself, the very picture of maternal satisfaction: and my belief is that woodchucks have as honest a right as most of us to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As I walked under the willows,--empty to-day, though I remembered more than one happy occasion when, in better company, I had found them alive with wings,--I paused to look through the branches at a large hawk and a few glossy-backed barn swallows quartering over the meadow. Then, all at once, there fell on my ears a shower of bobolink notes, and the birds, twenty or more together, dropped into the short grass before me. Every one of them was a male. A strange custom it is, this Quakerish separation of the sexes. It must be the females’ work, I imagine. Modesty and bashfulness are feminine traits,--modesty, bashfulness, and maidenly discretion. The wise virgin shunneth even the appearance of evil. Let the males flock by themselves, and travel in advance. And the males practice obedience, not for virtue’s sake, I guess, but of necessity; encouraged, no doubt, by an unquestioning belief that the wise virgins will come trooping after, and be found scattered conveniently over the meadows, each by herself, when the marriage bell strikes. That blissful hour was now close at hand, and my twenty gay bachelors knew it. Every bird of them had on his wedding garment. No wonder they sang.