And although I go on mentioning particulars, a flower, a bird, a bird’s note, it is none of these that I am really enjoying. It is the day--the brightness and the quiet, and the comfort of a perfect temperature. Great is weather. No man is to blame for talking about it, unless his talk is twaddle. Out-of-door people know that few things are more important. A quail’s whistle, a thought too strenuous, perhaps, for such an hour,--a breezy _quoit_,--breaks my disquisition none too soon; else I might have been brought in guilty under my own ruling. As I get over the fence, on my start homeward, I notice a thrifty clump of chokecherry shrubs on the other side of the way, hung with ripening clusters, every cherry a jewel as the sun strikes it. They may hang “for all me,” as schoolboys say. My country-bred taste is pretty catholic in matters of this kind, but it extends not to chokecherries. They should be eaten by campaign orators as a check upon fluency. POPULAR WOODPECKERS There are two birds in Newton, the present summer, that have perhaps attracted more attention than any pair of Massachusetts birds ever attracted before; more, by a good deal, I imagine, than was paid to a pair of crows that, for some inexplicable reason, built a nest and reared a brood of young a year ago in a back yard on Beacon Hill, in Boston. I refer to a pair of red-headed woodpeckers that have a nest (at this moment containing young birds nearly ready to fly) in a tall dead stump standing on the very edge of the sidewalk, like a lamp-post. The road, it should be said, is technically unfinished; one of those “private ways,” not yet “accepted” by the city and therefore legally “dangerous,” though in excellent condition and freely traveled. If the birds had intended to hold public receptions daily,--as they have done without intending it,--they could hardly have chosen a more convenient spot. The stump, which is about twenty-five feet in height, stands quite by itself in the middle of a small open space, with a wooded amphitheatrical knoll at its back, while on the other side it is overlooked by the windows of several houses, the nearest almost within stone’s throw. So conspicuous is it, indeed, that whenever I go there, as I do once in two or three days, to see how matters are coming on, I am almost sure to see the birds far in advance of my arrival.