The sun grows warm. I will betake myself to the maple grove and sit in the shadow; but first I notice in the grass by the wall an abundance of tiny veronica flowers (speedwell)--white, streaked with purple, as I perceive when I pluck one. Not a line but runs true. Everything is beautiful in its time; the little speedwell no less than the valley and the mountain. A red squirrel, far out on a tilting elm spray, is eating his fill of the green fruit. Mother Earth takes care of her children. She raises elm seeds as man raises wheat. And foolish man wonders sometimes at what he thinks her waste of vital energy. I have found a seat upon a prostrate maple trunk, one of the fathers of the grove, so huge of girth that it was almost a gymnastic feat to climb into my position. Here I can see the valley and the mountains only in parts, between the leafy intervening branches. Which way of seeing is the better I will not seek to determine. Both are good--both are better than either. A flycatcher near me is saying _chebec_ with such emphasis that though I cannot see him I can imagine that he is almost snapping his head off at every utterance. Much farther away is a relative of his; we call him the olive-side. (I wonder what name the birds have for us.) _Que-quee-o_, he whistles in the clearest of tones. He is one of the good ones. And how well his voice “carries”--as if one grove were speaking to another! About my feet are creamy white tiarella spires and pretty blue violets. The air is full of the hum of insects, but they are all innocent. I sit under my own beech and maple tree, with none to molest or make me afraid. How many times I have heard something like that on a Sunday forenoon! Year in and out, our dear old preacher could never get through his “long prayer” without it. He would not be sorry to know that I think of him now in this natural temple. An unseen Nashville warbler suddenly announces himself. “If you must scribble,” he says, “my name is as good as anybody’s.” The little flycatcher has not yet dislocated his neck. _Chebec, chebec_, he vociferates. The swallows no longer come about me. They care not for groves. They are for the open sky, the grass fields, and the sun; but I hear them twittering overhead. If I could be a bird, I think I would be a swallow. Hark! Yes, there is the syllabled whistle of a white-breasted nuthatch. He must go into my vacation bird-list--No. 79, _Sitta carolinensis_. If he would have shown himself sooner he should have had a higher place. And now, to my surprise, I hear the rollicking voice of a bobolink. The meadow below contains many of his happy kind, and one of them has come up within hearing to brighten my page.