“DOWN AT THE STORE” 194 BIRDS AT THE WINDOW 203 A GOOD-BY TO WINTER 212 BIRD SONGS AND BIRD TALK 219 CHIPMUNKS, BLUEBIRDS, AND ROBINS 226 MARCH SWALLOWS 233 WOODCOCK VESPERS 242 UNDER APRIL CLOUDS 250 FLYING SQUIRRELS AND SPADE-FOOT FROGS 258 THE WARBLERS ARE COMING 267 INDEX 275 THE CLERK OF THE WOODS THE CLERK OF THE WOODS A SHORT MONTH May is the shortest month in the year. February is at least twice as long. For a month is like a movement of a symphony; and when we speak of the length of a piece of music we are not thinking of the number of notes in it, but of the time it takes to play them. May is a scherzo, and goes like the wind. Yesterday it was just beginning, and to-day it is almost done. “If we could only hold it back!” an outdoor friend of mine used to say. And I say so, too. At the most generous calculation I cannot have more than a hundred more of such months to hope for, and I wish the Master’s _baton_ would not hurry the _tempo_. But who knows? Perhaps there will be another series of concerts, in a better music hall. The world hereabout will never be more beautiful than it was eight or ten days ago, with the sugar maples and the Norway maples in bloom and the tall valley willows in young yellow-green leaf. And now forsythia is having its turn. How thick it is! I should not have believed it half so common. Every dooryard is bright with its sunny splendor. “Sunshine bush,” it deserves to be called, with no thought of disrespect for Mr. Forsyth, whoever he may have been. I look at the show while it lasts. In a week or two the bushes will all have gone out of commission, so to speak, till the year comes round again. Shrubs are much in the case of men and women; the amount of attention they receive depends mainly on the dress they happen to have on at the moment. In my next-door neighbor’s yard there is a forsythia bush, not exceptionally large or handsome, that gives me as much pleasure as one of those wonderful tulip beds of which the Boston city gardeners make so much account. Are a million tulips, all of one color, crowded tightly together and bordered by a row of other tulips, all of another color, really so much more beautiful than a hundred or two, of various tints, loosely and naturally disposed? I ask the question without answering it, though I could answer it easily enough, so far as my own taste is concerned.