Narrowed to the width of tent or shanty front, the background but a pallid shroud of mist, the landscape yet holds much for pleasant study. But if the weather-bound camper exhausts this or tires of it, he may turn to gun-cleaning or tackle-mending. If a guide be with him, he can listen to his stories of hunting, fishing, and adventure, or learn woodcraft of him and the curious ways of birds and beasts. He may fashion birch-bark camp-ware, dippers, cups, and boxes, or whittle a paddle from a smooth-rifted maple. If he is of artistic turn, he can pleasantly devote an hour to etching pictures on the white under surface of the fungus that grows on decaying trees, and so provide himself with reminders of this rainy day in camp. So, with one and another pastime, he whiles away the sunless day, which, almost before he has thought of it, merges into the early nightfall, and he is lulled to sleep by the same sound that wakened him, the drip and patter of the rain. And when he looks back to these days of outing he may count this, which dawned so unpropitiously, not the least pleasant and profitable among them, and mark with a white stone the rainy day in camp. XXV AUGUST DAYS With such unmistakable signs made manifest to the eye and ear the summer signals its fullness and decline, that one awakening now from a sleep that fell upon him months ago might be assured of the season with the first touch of awakening. To the first aroused sense comes the long-drawn cry of the locust fading into silence with the dry, husky clap of his wings; the changed voice of the song birds, no more caroling the jocund tunes of mating and nesting time, but plaintive with the sadness of farewell. The bobolink has lost, with his pied coat, the merry lilt that tinkled so continually over the buttercups and daisies of the June meadows; rarely the song sparrow utters the trill that cheered us in the doubtful days of early spring. The bluebird's abbreviated carol floats down from the sky as sweet as then, but mournful as the patter of autumn leaves. The gay goldfinch has but three notes left of his June song, as he tilts on the latest blossoms and fluffy seeds of the thistles. The meadowlark charms us no more with his long-drawn melody, but with one sharp, insistent note he struts in the meadow stubble or skulks among the tussocks of the pasture and challenges the youthful gunner. What an easy shot that even, steady flight offers, and yet it goes onward with unfaltering rapid wing-beats, while the gun thunders and the harmless shot flies behind him. The flicker cackles now no more as when he was a jubilant new comer, with the new-come spring for his comrade, but is silent or only yelps one harsh note as he flashes his golden wings in loping flight from fence-stake to ant-hill.