tasting the first earth in the rye or corn stubble (and it tastes good). The earth looks good, it smells good, it is good. By the creek in the woods you hear the first water-thrush--a short, bright, ringing, hurried song. If you approach, the bird flies swiftly up or down the creek, uttering an emphatic "chip, chip." In wild, delicate beauty we have flowers that far surpass the arbutus: the columbine, for instance, jetting out of a seam in a gray ledge of rock, its many crimson and flame-colored flowers shaking in the breeze; but it is mostly for the eye. The spring-beauty, the painted trillium, the fringed polygala, the showy lady's-slipper, are all more striking to look upon, but they do not quite touch the heart; they lack the soul that perfume suggests. Their charms do not abide with you as do those of the arbutus. II These still, hazy, brooding mid-April mornings, when the farmer first starts afield with his plow, when his boys gather the buckets in the sugar-bush, when the high-hole calls long and loud through the hazy distance, when the meadowlark sends up her clear, silvery shaft of sound from the meadow, when the bush sparrow trills in the orchard, when the soft maples look red against the wood, or their fallen bloom flecks the drying mud in the road,--such mornings are about the most exciting and suggestive of the whole year. How good the fields look, how good the freshly turned earth looks!--one could almost eat it as does the horse;--the stable manure just being drawn out and scattered looks good and smells good; every farmer's house and barn looks inviting; the children on the way to school with their dinner-pails in their hands--how they open a door into the past for you! Sometimes they have sprays of arbutus in their buttonholes, or bunches of hepatica. The partridge is drumming in the woods, and the woodpeckers are drumming on dry limbs. The day is veiled, but we catch such glimpses through the veil. The bees are getting pollen from the pussy-willows and soft maples, and the first honey from the arbutus. It is at this time that the fruit and seed catalogues are interesting reading, and that the cuts of farm implements have a new fascination. The soil calls to one. All over the country, people are responding to the call, and are buying farms and moving upon them. My father and mother moved upon their farm in the spring of 1828; I moved here upon mine in March, 1874. I see the farmers, now going along their stone fences and replacing the stones that the frost or the sheep and cattle have thrown off, and here and there laying up a bit of wall that has tumbled down. There is rare music now in the unmusical call of the ph[oe]be-bird--it is so suggestive.