Something of Bolles’s purity of diction and sweet content in the gentle joy of life in the fields and woods, the sapphire cadences of distant mountain peaks and the chrysoprase tremolo of young leaves, seems to have come from the song of the white-throated sparrow that sings all day about Chocorua. “Peabody bird” we call the white-throat, from long custom, but to me his notes, clear, sweet and infinitely refreshing, seem to chant in accelerating diminuendo, “hap-pi-ness, hap-pi-ness, happiness,” till I lose the quivering cadences in an infinity of distance where sight and sound blend in the passing of dear dreams. The white-throated sparrow comes to the hills with the pink buds of the trailing arbutus, whose blooms are nowhere else so white and fair, and something of their fragrance seems always to come from his song. In little nooks where the early spring sunlight wells in pools of golden warmth the perfumes of the arbutus blooms and of the white-throat’s song come first, and they linger long into the summer where cool Northern hillsides hold the spring in their shadows. Sometimes the autumn, too, gives us a rare reblooming of the arbutus, and the white-throat sings his song of pure contentment well into the mellow haze of late September. Now that May is in the mountains one may see the warblers budding from the twigs with the leaves, nor shall he at first know which dappling of living light has burgeoned from the wood or which flashed in from the sky above, so harmonious are the contrasts of rich color. Often it seems to be the leaves that sing, so well does the tiny songster fit upon his perch. All about the lake in beech and birch the young buds lisp and the half-open leaves trill with the tiny music of the parulas. As you pass from ridge to lowland and on to ridge again they lead you along the hillsides and on to the cool depths of remoter ranges where the ancient hemlocks still grow, their gray beards of usnea moss hanging sedately in the shadows among their dark trunks. The parulas feed and sing in the light of deciduous trees, but they nest in this moss in the shadows of the black growth. Here comes true the fairy tale of the birds that built their nests in beards, for as I rest in the cloistered seclusion of the hemlocks two parulas come and press aside the gray lace draperies of pendent moss and enter in. There is the beginning of the nest, this tiny cavern which they wedge with their bodies from the matted moss. The lower ends of this are to be turned up and interwoven, making the bottom more secure, and pendent there in her swinging cradle, safe from the eyes of owl or jay above, from four-footed prowlers below, the mother bird will brood her rufous-wreathed white eggs.