The painted wood drake swims above the submerged tree roots; a pair of dusky ducks splash to flight, with a raucous clamor, out of a sedgy cove at your approach; the thronging blackbirds shower liquid melody and hail of discord from the purple-budded maples above you. All around, from the drift of floating and stranded water weeds, arises the dry, crackling croak of frogs, and from sunny pools the vibrant trill of toads. From afar come the watery boom of a bittern, the song of a trapper and the hollow clang of his setting pole dropping athwart the gunwales of his craft, the distant roar of a gun and the echoes rebounding from shore to shore. The grateful odor of the warming earth comes to your nostrils; to your ears, from every side, the sounds of spring; and yet you listen for fuller confirmation of its presence in the long-drawn wail of the plover and the rollicking melody of the bobolink. VII THE WOODCHUCK Chancing to pass a besmirched April snowbank on the border of a hollow, you see it marked with the footprints of an old acquaintance of whom for months you have not seen even so much as this. It is not that he made an autumnal pilgrimage, slowly following the swift birds and the retreating sun, that you had no knowledge of him, but because of his home-keeping, closer than a hermit's seclusion. These few cautious steps, venturing but half way from his door to the tawny naked grass that is daily edging nearer to his threshold, are the first he has taken abroad since the last bright lingering leaf fluttered down in the Indian summer haze, or perhaps since the leaves put on their first autumnal tints. He had seen all the best of the year, the blooming of the first flowers, the springing of the grass and its growth, the gathering of the harvests and the ripening of fruits, and possibly the gorgeousness of autumn melting into sombre gray. He had heard all the glad songs of all the birds and the sad notes of farewell of bobolink and plover to their summer home; he had seen the swallows depart and had heard the droning of the bumblebee among the earliest and latest of his own clover blossoms. All the best the world had to give in the round of her seasons, luxuriant growth to feed upon, warm sunshine to bask in, he had enjoyed; of her worst, he would have none.