Another stage, to the edge of the woods, and I rest again, the breeze encouraging me. A second bluebird is caroling. Every additional one is cause for thankfulness. Imagine a place where bluebirds should be as thick as English sparrows are in our American cities! Imagine heaven! A crested flycatcher screams, an olive-side calls _pip, pip_, a robin cackles, an oven-bird recites his piece with schoolboy emphasis, an alder flycatcher _queeps_, and a vesper sparrow sings. And at the end, as if for good measure, a Maryland yellow-throat adds his _witchery, witchery_. The breeze comes to me over broad beds of hay-scented fern, and at my feet are bunchberry blossoms and the white star-flower. At this moment, nevertheless, the cooling, insect-dispersing wind is better than all things else. Such is one effect of hot weather, setting comfort above poetry. I leave the wind behind, and take my way into the wood, where there is nothing in particular to delay me except an occasional windfall, which must be clambered over or beaten about. Half an hour, more or less, of lazy traveling, and I come out upon the railroad at the big sugar-maple grove. This is one of the sights of the country in the bright-leaf season, say the first week of October; something, I have never concluded what, giving to its colors a most remarkable depth and richness. Putting times together, I must have spent hours in admiring it, now from different points on the Butter Hill round, now from Bald Mountain. At present every leaf of it is freshly green, and somewhere within it dwells a wood thrush, for whose golden voice I sit down in the shade to listen. He is in no haste, and no more am I. Let him take his time. Other birds also are a little under the weather, as it appears; but the silence cannot last. A scarlet tanager’s voice is the first to break it. High as the temperature is, he is still hoarse. And so is the black-throated blue warbler that follows him. A pine siskin passes overhead on some errand, announcing himself as he goes. There is no need for him to speak twice. Then come three warblers,--a Nashville, a magnolia, and a blue yellow-back; and after them a piece of larger game, a smallish hawk. He breaks out of the dense wood behind me, perches for half a minute in an open maple, where I can see that he has prey of some kind in his talons, and then, taking wing, ascends in circles into the sky, and so disappears. That is locomotion of a sort to make a man and his umbrella envious.