All the time I have sat here I have been hoping to hear the hearty, “full-throated” note of a yellow-throated vireo. This is the only place in Franconia where I have ever heard it--two years ago this month. But the bird seems not to be here now, and I must not stay longer. My companion, who has gone higher up the hill to visit a thorn-bush, will be expecting me on the bridge by the old grist-mill. Before I can get away, however, I add another name to my bird-list,--a welcome name, the wood pewee’s. He has just arrived from the South, I suppose. What a sweetly modulated, plaintive-sounding whistle! How different from the bobolink’s “jest and youthful jollity!” And now the crested breaks out again all at once, after a long silence. There is a still stronger contrast. Four flycatchers are in voice together: the crested, the olive-sided, the least, and the wood pewee. I have heard them all within the space of a minute. As soon as I am in the valley I shall hear the alder flycatcher, and when, braving the mosquitoes, I venture into the tamarack swamp a little way to look at the Cape May warbler (I know the very spot) I shall doubtless hear the yellow-belly. These, with the kingbird and the phœbe, which are about all the farms, make the full New Hampshire contingent. No doubt there are flies enough for all of them. As I start to leave the grove, stepping over beds of round-leaved violets and spring-beauties, both out of flower already, I start at the sound of an unmusical note, which I do not immediately recognize, but which in another instant I settle upon as a sapsucker’s. This is a bird at whose absence my companion and I have frequently expressed surprise, remembering how common we have found him in previous visits. I go in pursuit at once, and presently come upon him. He is in extremely bright plumage, his crown and his throat blood red. He goes down straightway as No. 81. I am having a prosperous day. Three new names within half an hour! Idling in a sugar orchard is good for a man’s bird-list as well as for his soul. An oven-bird is declaiming, a blue yellow-back is practicing scales, and a field sparrow is chanting. And even as I pencil their names a nuthatch (the very one I have been hearing) flies to a maple trunk and alights for a moment at the door of his nest. Without question he passed a morsel to his brooding mate, though I was not quick enough to see him. Yes, within a minute or two he is there again; but the sitting bird does not appear at the entrance; her mate thrusts his bill into the door instead. The happy pair! There is much family life of the best sort in a wood like this. No doubt there are husbands and wives, so called, in Franconia as well as in other places, who might profitably heed the old injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.” IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY