The cuckoo, of course, you may hear often on any warm night, springing his watchman’s rattle chuckle from the denser part of the thicket. But for the brown thrush to be announcing morning every half-hour through the darkness was an absurdity to be accounted for only on the theory that here was a gay young blood who was practising for a moonlight serenade. And when the moon did come, touching the tops of the pines first with a fine edging of gold, dropping a luminous benediction to the birches and diffusing it lower and lower till the whole pasture was gold and dusk, the ecstasy of the thrush knew no limit. He poured forth a perfect uproar of liquid melody, punctuated with such hurroos and whoops of delight that he made me wonder if his lady love would like such college-song methods of serenading. I sat up from my couch on the green moss under the huckleberry bush to listen. The people of the pasture seemed to have trooped up to the call of the music. The red cedars, the birches, the huckleberry bushes in the daytime have individuality indeed, but in the night-time they have personality. They loom up in spots where by day you did not notice them at all. Some red cedars stand erect and stiff as military men might on sentinel duty, others gowned in black like monks of old group together and seem to consult, while all about them mingling in gracious beauty are the birches and the berry bushes,--the birches slender, dainty aristocrats gowned in the thinnest of whispering silk, the berry bushes sturdy and comfortable in homespun. You are half afraid of the cedars, they are so black and seem to watch you so intently, more than half in love with the birches, so graceful and enticing, as they lean toward you in their diaphanous drapery, but it is the berry bushes shouldering up to greet you in hearty bourgeois welcome that make you feel at home. I listened to the thrush, but soon I found that I had only one ear to do it with, for on the other side of me a bird was rapidly approaching with greater and equally persistent clamor. It was a whip-poor-will, seemingly roused to rivalry by the challenge of the thrush. So far as I know the thrush paid no attention to him but simply kept up his song in the birch near by, but the whip-poor-will came up little by little till he seemed almost over my head, and I could hear plainly the hoarse intake of breath between each call. Very brief gasps these intakes were, for the whip-poor-wills fairly tumbled over one another without cessation.