After luncheon I must sit for a while in the forest itself. Every breath in the treetops, unfelt at my level, brings down a sprinkling of yellow birch leaves, each with a faint rustle, like a whispered good-by, as it strikes against the twigs in its fall. Every one preaches its sermon, and I know the text,--“We all do fade.” May the rest of us be as happy as the leaves, and fade only when the time is ripe. A nuthatch, busy with his day’s work, passes near me. Small as he is, I hear his wing-beats. A squirrel jumps upon the very log on which I am seated, but is off in a jiffy on catching sight of so unexpected a neighbor. So short a log is not big enough for two of us, he thinks. By and by I hear a bird stirring on a branch overhead, and look up to find him a red-eyed vireo. One of the belated, he must be, according to my almanac. He peers down at me with inquisitive, sidelong glances. A man!--in such a place!--and sitting still! I like to believe that he, as well as I, feels a pleasurable surprise at the unlooked-for encounter. We call him the preacher, but he is not sermonizing to-day, perhaps because the falling leaves have taken the words out of his mouth. It is one of the best things about a place like this that it gives a man a most unusual feeling of remoteness and isolation. To be here is not the same as to be in some equally wild and silent spot nearer to human habitations. The sense of the climb we have made, of the wilderness we have traversed, still folds us about. The fever and the fret, so constant with us as to be mostly unrealized or taken for the normal state of man, are for the moment gone, and peace settles upon the heart. For myself, at least, there is an unspeakable sweetness in such an hour. I could stay here, forever, I think, till I became a tree. That feeling I have often had,--a state of ravishment, a kind of absorption into the life of things about me. It will not last, and I know it will not; but it is like heaven, for the time it is on me,--a foretaste, perhaps, of the true Nirvana. Yet to-day--so self-contradictory a creature is man--there were some things I missed. The dreamer was still a hobbyist, and the hobbyist had been in the Lonesome Lake woods before; and he wondered what had become of the crossbills. The common red ones were always here, I should have said, and on more than one visit I had found the rarer and lovelier white-winged species. Now, in all the forest chorus, not a crossbill’s note was audible.