Perhaps we come to some such realization of the greatness of nature’s expression in spite of ourselves. We measure natural phenomenon with marvelous accuracy. We are always busy at it, cropping or adding names, readjusting interpretations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. The miracle is still untouched. Why is the mindless flower less than ourselves and our assessments, or the bird’s reaction less remarkable? That which is without mind is not necessarily heedless. Perhaps spring is a manifestation of mind; and its lives, all those facets of motion and beauty, behave in its context as familiars. Each responds in terms of an alliance intrinsically known, as with the birds along their shore. _Travel_ For all my wonder at it, spring brings me into direct and close enjoyment. Down the distance to blue water, the young oak leaves in delicate silvery greens and pinks, swing in the full south wind. There is a wave of baltimore orioles. They seem to have arrived all at once. They dive through the tree tops and chase each other, living jubilations in orange and black, shouting out what sounds to me like: “This is the birthday of the Lord, Oh Joy!” Then a scarlet tanager appears, silently perching on a pink-leaved oak. It has so blinding and brilliant a color as to make no sense in terms of camouflage, or environmental adaptation, unless like the oriole, it is a treetop, sun-high bird, fitted to the colors of the sun, half tropical. Now it seems like a gift of extravagance. Crane flies and gnats are swarming. Moths crowd the windows at night. The ground stirs with beetles and spiders. I watch a bumblebee digging a tunnel. Every minute or so a tiny yellow pile of sand appears at the surface and then tumbles down, pushed back by the bee, which half emerges, giving a little whining buzz, like a grunt of exertion, and then disappears down its hole again. Toward evening I see a red-wing blackbird on the far side of a cranberry bog, epaulets ablaze against the low sun. It is attacking two impervious crows sitting on a tree, who must have just made a meal of red-wing eggs. It flies over and around them, back and forth, vainly, hopelessly. A few terns, newly arrived, are courting on the sand flats beyond the shore. With light, airy grace, a male flies above a female waiting on the sand, offering her a silvery fish. Then they both fly up and glide together across the blue and white reaches below them. Inland, two iridescent tree swallows go through similar formalities. A female perches on an oak post and the male constantly dips down and flutters above her, barely touching, performing a kind of aerial caress. Then he flies up and around her, with a chittering, trilling, clicking kind of sound. She flies down and pecks at the ground. Then both of them, in the growing darkness limber with new green and shimmering silver, wheel low together, in wide circles against the dying sun.