Come sit beside the weary way And hear the angels sing.
Ride with Aucassin into the greenwood. There perchance, as happed to him, you will see the green grass grow and listen to the sweet birds sing and hear some good word.
To him who will but listen there are adventures in bird-songs anywhere, any time, and any season. It was but last winter that I found myself again in the dawn-dusk facing a defiant hickory, armed only with an axe. Let me recommend to every man who is worried about his body, his soul, or his estate during the winter months, that he buy or borrow a well-balanced axe and cut down and cut up a few trees for fire-wood. As he forces the tingling iced oxygen into every cell of his lungs, he will find that he is taking a new view of life and love and debt and death, and other perplexing and perennial topics.
Quite recently I read a journal that a young minister kept, back in the fifties. One entry especially appealed to me.
"Decided this morning that I was not the right man for this church. Chopped wood for two hours in Colonel Hewitt's wood-lot. Decided that this was the church for me and that I was the man for this church."
On this particular morning, I heard once more the wild dawn-song of the Carolina wren, full of liquid bell-like overtones. As I listened, my mind went back to another wren-song. I had been hunting for the nest of a yellow palm warbler in a little gully in the depths of a northern forest. The blood ran down my face from the fierce bites of the black-flies, and the mosquitoes stung like fire. Suddenly, from the side of the tiny ravine, began a song full of ringing, glassy notes such as one makes by running a wet finger rapidly on the inside of a thin glass finger-bowl. Listening, I forgot that I was wet and tired and hungry and bitten and stung. For the first time I listened to the song of the winter wren. For years I had met this little bird along the sides of brooks in the winter and running in and out of holes and under stones like a mouse; but to-day to me it was no longer a tiny bird. It was the voice of the untamed, unknown northern woods. It is hard to make any notation of the song. It flowed like some ethereal stream filled with little bubbles of music which broke in glassy tinkling sprays of sound over the under-current of the high vibrating melody itself. The song seemed to have two parts. The first ended in a contralto phrase, while the second soared like a fountain into a spray of tinkling trills. Through it all ran a strange unearthly dancing lilt, such as the fairy songs must have had, heard by wandering shepherds at the edge of the green fairy hills. At its very height the melody suddenly ceased, and once again I dropped back into a workaday, mosquito-ridden world, with ten miles between me and my camp.