One bird was calling just over the roadside wall. I stole nearer and nearer, taking a few cautious steps after each bleat, till finally I could hear the water dropping into the hogshead. I wonder how many readers will know what I mean by that. After each call, as a kind of pendant to it, there comes, if you are very, very close, a curious small sound, exactly as if a drop of water (the comparison is not mine) had fallen into a hogshead already half full. I had not heard it for years. In fact, I had forgotten it, and heard it now for the first few times without recollecting what it was. Then the bird rose--always invisible, of course, for by this time there was no thought of seeing anything--and went skyward in broad circles, till he was at the top of his flight, and when he descended he came to earth on the other side of the road, a good distance away. He had seen me, I suppose, with those big bull’s-eyes of his, which do so much to heighten the oddity of his personal appearance. He was the last of his kind. For the rest of my walk I heard no music except the sweet whistling of hylas here and there, and once, in a woodland pool, the grating chorus of a set of wood frogs. Butterflies are waiting for sunshine--like the rest of us; I have not seen so much as an Antiopa; and the only wild flowers I have yet picked are the pretty red blossoms (pistillate blossoms) of the hazel; tiny things, floral egrets, if you please to call them so, of a lively and beautiful color. Sunshine or no sunshine, they were in bloom for Easter. FLYING SQUIRRELS AND SPADE-FOOT FROGS It is pleasant to realize familiar truths anew; to have it brought freshly to mind, for example, how many forms of animal life there are about us of which we seldom get so much as a glimpse. In all my tramping over eastern Massachusetts I have met with two foxes. One I saw for perhaps the tenth part of a second, the other for perhaps two or three seconds. And probably my experience has not been exceptional. In this one particular it would be safe to wager that not one in ten of those who read this article will be able to boast of any great advantage over the man who wrote it. Yet every raiser of poultry hereabout will certify that foxes are by no means uncommon, and I know a man living within fifteen miles of the State House who, last winter, by a kind of “still hunt”--without a dog--killed three foxes in as many successive days. Reynard has fine gifts of invisibility, but a man with foxes on his mind will be likely to find them.