To me it was neither desolate nor forbidding, because I knew it well,—its gloomy depths, its silent streams, its hollow stumps, its trails, and its haunting mysteries. Yet I had never crossed its borders. I was born within its shadows, close enough to smell the magnolias of the margin, and had lived my first ten years only a little farther off; but not till now, after twice ten years of absence, had I stood here ready to enter and tread the paths where so long I had slipped to and fro as a shadow. But what a pity ever to cross such a country! ever to map these unexplored child-lands to a scale of after years! I tramped the Bear Swamp over from edge to edge, letting the light of day into the deepest of its recesses, and found—a turkey buzzard’s nest. The silent streams, the stumps, the trails, I found, too, and there, it seems, they must be found a century hence; but the haunting mysteries of the great swamp fled away before me, and are gone forever. So much did I pay for my buzzard’s nest. The cost in time and trouble was what came near undoing my good uncle, with whom I was staying near the swamp. “What in thunderation!” he exclaimed, when I made known my desires. “From Boston to Haleyville to see a buzzard’s nest!” As there are some things that even one’s wife cannot quite understand, I didn’t try to reason the matter of buzzards’ nests with an uncle. If it had been a hawk’s nest or a cardinal’s, he would have thought nothing strange. But a buzzard’s! Perhaps my years of absence from the skies of the buzzard account for it. Yet it was never mere bird, mere buzzard, to me; so much more than buzzard, indeed, that I often wish it would sail into these empty New England skies. How eagerly I watch for it when homeward bound toward Jersey! The moment I cross the Delaware I begin to search the skies, and I know, for sure, when it swims into view, that I am near the blessed fields once more. No matter how wide and free, how full of clouds and color, my sky to the end will always need a soaring buzzard. This is a burst of sentiment, truly, and doesn’t explain at all why I should want to see the creature of these divine wings in the gruesome light of an earth-view, on its nesting stump or in its hollow log. Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown! It must, or we shall rue it: We have a vision of our own; Ah! why should we undo it? I understand. Nevertheless, I wanted to find a buzzard’s nest,—the nest of the Bear Swamp buzzard; and here at last I stood; and yonder on the clouds, a mere mote in the distance, floated one of the birds. It was coming toward me over the wide reach of the swamp.