All of this may be petty prying, not communion at all; it may be all moonshine and sentiment, not science. But it is not cant and self-deception,—in the hearts of thousands of simple, sufficient folk, who know a wood thrush when they hear him, and whose woodpaths are of their own wearing. And if it is not communion with nature, I know that it is at least real pleasure, and rest, peace, contentment, red blood, sound sleep, and, at times, it seems to me, something close akin to religion. [Illustration] V Chickadee ONCE (it was a good while ago, when I was a boy), I tried to write a poem. The first stanza ran:— I heard him when the reeds were young Along a clover sea; Above the purple waves he hung, And o’er the fragrant waters flung His storm of ecstasy; and the last stanza ran:— He’s left the meadows burnt and hot, He’s left me lone and drear; But still within the white-birch lot Cheeps Chickadee—whom I forgot While Bobolink was here; which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not sing a while in June and then fly away and leave us. He stays the year around; he is constant and faithful in his friendship, though I sometimes forget. He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could have only one of the birds? As it is, I get along for more than half the year without bobolink, but what would my out-of-doors be without chickadee? There is not a single day in the year that I cannot find him, no matter how hot, or cold, how hard it rains or snows. Often he is the only voice in all the silent woods, the only spark of life aglow in all my frozen winter world. I was crunching along through the January dusk toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered off among the naked bushes,—a moment of sound, a bit of life vanishing in the winter night of the woods. I knew the very hemlock in which he would roost; but what were the thick, snow-bent boughs of his hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in such a night as this?—this vast of sweeping winds and frozen snow! The road dipped from the woods into a meadow, where the winds were free. The cold was driving, numbing here with a power for death that the thermometer could not mark. I backed into the wind and hastened on toward the double line of elms that arched the road in front of the house. Already I could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass. It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive; for what could live in this long darkness and fearful cold? Could live? The question was hardly thought, when an answer was whirled past me into the nearest of the naked elms. A chickadee! He caught for an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled along to its broken tip, and whisked over into a hole that ran straight down the centre of the stub, down, for I don’t know how far.