I loiter about the fields for an hour or more, looking at the blue mountains and the nearer, gayer-colored hills, but the occupant of the house is nowhere to be found. I was hoping for a chat with him. A seeing man, who lives by himself in such a place as this, is sure to have something to talk about. The last time I was here he told me a pretty story of a hummingbird. He was in the house, as I remember it, when he heard the familiar, squeaking notes of a hummer, and thinking that their persistency must be occasioned by some unusual trouble, went out to investigate. Sure enough, there hung the bird in a spider’s web attached to a rosebush, while the owner of the web, a big yellow-and-brown, pot-bellied, bloodthirsty rascal, was turning its victim over and over, winding the web about it. Wings and legs were already fast, so that all the bird could do was to cry for help. And help had come. The man at once killed the spider, and then, little by little, for it was an operation of no small delicacy, unwound the mesh in which the bird was entangled. The lovely creature lay still in his open hand till it had recovered its breath, and then flew away. Who would not be glad to play the good Samaritan in such guise? As I intimated just now, you may talk with a hundred smartly dressed, smoothly spoken city men without hearing a piece of news half so important or interesting. It is five o’clock when I leave the farms and am again skirting the woods. Now I face the sun, the level rays of which transfigure the road before me till its beauty is beyond all attempt at description. I look at it as for a very few times in my life I have looked at a painted landscape, with unspeakable enjoyment. The subject is of the simplest: a few rods of common grassy road, arched with bright leaves and drenched in sunshine; but the suggestion is infinite. After this the way brings me into sight of the fairest of level green meadows, with pools of smooth water--“water stilled at even”--and scattered farmhouses. The day is ending right; and when I reach the hotel piazza and look back, there in the east is the full moon rising in all her splendor, attended by rosy clouds. WITH THE WADERS The 12th of October was a day. There are few like it in our Massachusetts calendar. And by a stroke of good fortune I had chosen it for a trip to Eagle Hill, on the North Shore. All things were near perfection; the only drawbacks to my enjoyment being a slight excess of warmth and an unseasonable plague of mosquitoes. “Yes, it is _too_ fine,” said the stable-keeper, who drove me down from the railroad station. “It won’t last. It’s what we call a weather breeder.”