As I crossed the marsh and approached the gate, a stranger overtook me. We managed the business together, one pulling the gate to, the other tending the hook and staple, and we spoke of the unusual greenness of the hills before us, on which flocks and herds were grazing. “There’s better feed now than there’s been all summer,” the stranger said. It was easy to believe it. Those broad-backed, grassy hills are one of the glories of the North Shore. I followed the road as it led me among them. A savanna sparrow had been dodging along the edge of a ditch near the gate; titlark voices at once became common, and after a turn or two I saw before me a bunch of shore larks dusting themselves in the sandy middle of the track. They were making thorough work of it, crowding their breasts and necks, and even the sides of their heads into the soil, with much shaking of feathers afterward. The road brought me to a beach, where were two or three houses, and, across the way, a pond stocked with wooden geese and ducks, with an underground blind for gunners in the side of the hill. Some delights are so keen that it is worth elaborate preparations to enjoy them. Here the titlarks were in extraordinary force, and I lingered about the spot for half an hour, awaiting the longspurs that might be hoped for in their company. Hoped for, but nothing more. I was still too early, perhaps. Well, their absence, the fact of it once accepted, left me free-minded for the main object of my trip. I would go up the hill, over the grass, and take the prospect northward. A narrow depression, down which a brook trickled with a pleasant, companionable noise, as if it were talking to itself, afforded me shelter from the wind, and at the same time bounded my outlook on either side, as a frame bounds a picture. The hill fell away sharply to the water just beyond my feet, and up and down the inlet gulls were flying. Once, to my pleasure, two black-backed “coffin-bearers” passed, the only ones I was able to discover among the thousands of herring gulls that filled the air and the water, and crowded the sand-bars, the whole day long. Across the blue water were miles of brown marsh, and beyond the marsh rose wooded hills veiled with haze, the bright autumnal colors shining through. Crickets were still musical, buttercups and dandelions starred the turf, and once a yellow butterfly (Philodice) flitted near. The summer was gone, but here were some of its children to keep it remembered. Titlarks walked daintily about the grass, or balanced themselves upon the boulders, and once I turned my head just in time to see a marsh hawk sailing over the hill at my back, his white rump showing.