Why should berries be so many, and a man’s digestive capacity so near to nothing? The very bushes reproached me; like a jealous housewife who finds her choicest dainties discarded on the plate. “We have piped unto you and ye have not danced,” they seemed to mutter. I grew shame-faced and looked the other way: at the splendid rosettes of red bunchberries; at a bush full of red (another red) mountain-holly berries, red with a most exquisite purplish bloom, the handsomest berries in the world, I am ready to believe. Or I stopped to consider a cluster of varnished baneberries, or a few modest, drooping, leaf-hidden jewels of the twisted stalk. In truth, and in short, it was berry-time in Franconia. What a strait a man would have been in if all kinds had been humanly edible! With all the rest there was no passing the strangely blue bear-plums, as Northern people call the fruit of clintonia. A strange blue, I say. Left to myself I should never have found a word for it; but by good luck I raised the question with a man who, as I now suppose, is probably the only person in the world who could have told me what I needed to know. He is an authority upon pottery and porcelain, and he answered on the instant, though I cannot hope to quote him exactly, that the color was that of the Ming dynasty. Every Chinese dynasty, I think he said, has a color of its own for its pottery. When the founder of the Ming dynasty was asked of what shade he would have the royal dinner set, he replied: “Let it be that of the sky after rain.” And so it was the color of Franconia bear-plums. Which strikes me as a circumstance very much to the Ming dynasty’s credit. In a lonely stretch of the road, with a cattle pasture on one side and a wood on the other, where tall grass in full flower stood between the horse track and the wheel rut (this was a good berrying place, also, had I been equal to my opportunity), I stood still to enjoy the music of a hermit thrush, which happened to be at just the right distance. A holy voice it was, singing a psalm, measure responding to measure out of the same golden throat. I tried to fit words to it. “Oh,” it began, but for the remainder of the strophe there were no syllables in our heavy, consonant-weighted English tongue. It might be Spanish, I thought--musical vowels with _l_’s and _d_’s holding them together. I remembered the reputed saying of Charles V., that Spanish is the language of the gods, and was ready to add, “and of hermit thrushes.” But perhaps this was only a fancy. One thing was certain: the bird sang in Spanish or in something better. If a man could eat raspberries as long as he can listen to sweet sounds!