To all who love the lore of woodland life the country up around Chocorua lake and mountain must always be haunted by the gentle spirit of Frank Bolles, whose books, all too few, breathe the very essence of its perennial charm. To nature lovers who come year after year to the place these books are a litany, and all the bird songs are echoes of the notes he loved. Nor need there be an hour of the twenty-four in this region, in May, in which the birds do not sing. No night is too dark for the wistful plaint of the whip-poor-wills, wandering voices that seem born of the loneliness of the bare places in the hills before man was. To the wakeful ear their sorrow hardly seems soothing, yet when drowsiness comes from long days in the mountain air the whip-poor-will’s plaint is a primal, preadamite lullaby that as surely sings to sleep as does the cadenced sorrow of the wind in the pines or the minor murmur of a mountain brook, intermittently tossed over the hill by the night breeze. Often at nightfall the “clackety clack, cow, cow, cow” of the yellow-billed cuckoo sounds through the Chocorua woods, as if a lanternless watchman were making his rounds and sounding the hour with his rattle. Often, too, some songbird will rouse from sleep as if he heard the cuckoo watchman, going his rounds, pipe him a sleepy bar or two of his day song, notes strangely vivid in the perfumed darkness, then drowse again with the melody half finished. But of all these the whip-poor-wills are most persistent and loudest. They greet the dusk with antiphonal chant, and when they finally follow the shadows to rest in the darkest wood the choir of day takes their silence for its matin bell. [Illustration: “The farmhouse where Bolles lived and loved the woods and all that therein lived with him.” _See page 197_ ]