We reached open country at last, and here were birds without number. How quickly all else fades at such a time! The whole valley trembled with the ringing whistle of a thousand red-wings. A few swallows—the first of their kind to return—darted over the wide waters and rested on projecting branches of trees that floods had stranded on the islands. The sprightly kill-deers ran with such dainty steps over the sand that I could not find their footprints. They, too, were pioneer birds, but none the less light-hearted because alone. They sang with all their last year’s earnestness, scattering music among the marshes where frogs were now holding high carnival. They were very tame, at least so far as we were concerned, but a little in doubt as to what a stray hawk might be about. But they left us only to make room for others, and whether we looked riverward or landward mattered not: it was birds, birds, birds! Here a hundred sparrows in an oak, there a troop of snow-birds in the bushes, a whistling titmouse sounding his piercing notes, the plaintive bluebird floating overhead, the laugh of the loon at the bend of the river, and buzzards searching for stranded herring where the seine had been drawn. A flock of herons, too, passed overhead, and, had they not seen us, might have stopped here on the river-shore. What an addition to a landscape! and yet now so seldom seen. No birds can be more harmless than they, yet not even the hawks are subject to greater persecution. Not long since these birds were abundant, and a “heronry” was one of the “sights” of many a neighborhood; but people now scarcely know what a “heronry” is. The very word suggests how rapidly our large birds are disappearing, and their roosting-places, where hundreds gathered and nested, too, in season, are matters of “ancient history.” In fear and trembling, the herons that linger about our watercourses singly seek secluded trees wherein to rest, and, I fear, even then sleep with one eye open. A fancy, on the part of women, for heron plumes has wrought a deal of mischief. But where is the pyxie? We knew it must be near at hand, but why make haste to find it? All else was so beautiful here, why not wait even until another day? The river-bank was itself a study. At the top, sand of snowy whiteness; then a ribbon of clay over which water trickled carrying iron in solution, that was slowly cementing a sand stratum beneath, where every degree of density could be found, from solid rock to a paste-like mass that we took pleasure in moulding into fantastic shapes, thereby renewing our dirt-pie days.