Franconia boys, I have noticed, have a cheerful, businesslike, independent way with them, neither bashful nor overbold, and it was gratifying to see them so quick to improve a new and not unamusing method of turning a penny. Work that has to do with a game is no more than half work, though the game be played by somebody else; and some of the boys, it was to be remarked, carried golf sticks of their own. Trust a Yankee lad to combine business and pleasure. One such I heard of, who was already planning how to invest his prospective capital. “Mamma,” he said, “can’t I spend part of my money for a fishing-rod?” “But, my dear,” said his mother, “you know it was agreed that the first of it should go for clothes.” “Yes, mamma, but a boy can get along without clothes; and I’ve never had any fishing-rod but a peeled stick.” It sounds like a fairy tale, but it is strictly true, that a famous angler, just then disabled from practicing his art, overheard--or was told of, I am not certain which--this heart-warming confession of faith, and at once said, “My boy, I will give you a fishing-rod.” And so he did, and a silk line with it. A boy who could get on without clothes, but must have the wherewithal to go a-fishing, was a boy with a sense of values, a philosopher in the bud, and merited encouragement. While I watched these industrial processions (“Gidap, Charlie! Gidap!” says a cheery voice down the road), I listened to the few singers whose morning music could still be counted upon: one or two song sparrows, a field sparrow, an indigo-bird (as true a lover of August as of feathery larch tops), a red-eyed vireo, and a distant hermit thrush. Almost always a score or two of social barn swallows were near by, dotting the telegraph wires, or, if the morning was cold, dropping in bunches of twos and threes into the thick foliage of young elms. In the trees, on the wires, or in the air, they were sure to keep up a comfortable-sounding chorus of squeaky twitters. The barn swallow is born a gossip; or perhaps we should say a talking sage--a Socrates, if you will, or a Samuel Johnson. Now and then--too rarely--a vesper sparrow sang a single strain, or a far-away white-throat gave voice across the meadow; and once a passing humming-bird, a good singer with his wings, stopped to probe the monk’s-hood blossoms in the garden patch. The best that can be said of the matter is that for birds the season was neither one thing nor another. Lovers of field ornithology should come to the mountains earlier or later, leaving August to the crowd of common tourists, who love nature, of course (who doesn’t in these days?), but only in the general; who believe with Walt Whitman--since it is not necessary to read a poet in order to share his opinions--that “you must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness--even ignorance, credulity--helping your enjoyment of these things.”