That is the way it was this morning. All the trees had white baby leaves of infinite daintiness and ghosts of blossoms that were not real enough for a promise. I might better call them remembrance, touched with hope. Hardly was the touch of hope there at the earliest light. It was just white and delicate remembrance. Then, with the thought of the sun, only the thought for the sun himself was not to come for long, there came a slender opalescence welling through these white garments, an iridescent presence that you felt rather than saw, till I knew without looking to the east that the dawn had grown out of the earth into the high heavens and the miracle was complete. Out of this miracle of the birth of morning light came two pleasant things. One was the red sun, peeping robustly in among the pines, adding his glow to the warmth of their shelter; the other was a bustle of merry company heralded by a salvo of elfin trumpets. A company of chickadees came breakfasting, and with them were nuthatches. I think no one has ever see the trumpet which the nuthatch blows, but its tiny, tin toot is a familiar sound in the pine woods at this time of year. If some fay of the fairy orchestra, returning in haste from revels which lasted till the gray of the morning, did not drop it, I cannot tell where the nuthatch did pick it up. Its note is certainly more elfin than bird-like and always seems to add a tiny touch of romantic mystery to the day. Such a November morning is fine for birds’-nesting. You may go hunting birds’ nests in June if you wish to, but you will not find very many, half so many in a day as I can find now almost in a glance. Down stream there is a little island crowded with alder and elder, milkweed and joe-pye weed, and garlanded with virgin’s bower, where I called many days last summer to watch the insect life that rioted about it. A bed of milkweed bloom was each day a busy and cosmopolitan community. Right at my elbow as I stood in July watching this was a blackbird’s nest. I must have brushed it more than once, but I never saw it until to-day. To be sure, when I first went there the young blackbirds were grown up and gone, for the nesting season with these birds is short, and by July the young are flying about with the flock, learning to sing “tchk, tchk, conkaree.” Had there been young or eggs in the nest the distress of the parent birds would have warned me of its presence. Lacking that, so cleverly was it placed for safety and concealment, I never noticed it till the passing of the leaves left it bare.