I recognized at once my Enthusiast, a dear friend and fellow bird-lover, who I knew was coming to spend some weeks in the village. I rushed to the door to greet her.
"I'm delighted to see you!" she cried, as we clasped hands across the wheels. "I arrived an hour or two ago, and now I want to go where I can hear a hermit thrush. I've come all the way from Chicago to hear that bird."
She dismounted, declined the invitation to tea given by my hostess, who stood speechless with amazement at the erratic taste that would forego tea for the sake of a bird song, and we started at once up the road, where I had seen the bird perched in a partially dead hemlock-tree, and heard
"his ravishing carol ring From the topmost twig he made his throne."
Everything was perfectly still. Not a bird peeped. Even the tireless vireo, who peopled the woods as the English sparrow the city streets, was hushed. I began to be anxious; could it be too cool for song? or too late? We walked steadily on, up the beautiful winding road: on one side dense forest, on the other lovely changing views of the hills across the intervale, blue now with approaching night. Crows called as they hurried over; the little sandpiper's "ah weet! weet! weet!" came up from the river bank, but in the woods all was silent.
Still we went on, climbing the steep hills, loitering through the valleys, till suddenly a bird note broke the stillness, quite near us, a low, yearning "wee-o!"
"Is that the veery?" she exclaimed. (She had come from the home of the wood thrush, where hermit and veery were unknown.)
Again it came, more plaintive than before; once more, in an almost agonized tone; and so it continued, ever growing higher in pitch and more mournful, till we could hardly endure to listen to it. Then arose the matchless song, the very breath of the woods, the solemn, mysterious, wonderful song of the bird, and two listeners, at least, lingered in ecstasy to hear, till it dropped to silence again.
Then, slowly and leisurely, we went on. The dead hemlock, the throne of the hermit, was vacant. On a bank not far off we sat down to wait, talking in hushed tones of the veery, of the oven-bird whose rattling call was now just beginning, of the mysterious "see-here" bird whose plaintive call was sounding from the upper twig of another dead-topped tree, of the hermit himself, when, to our amazement, a small bird soared out of the woods, a few feet above our heads, flew around in a circle of perhaps fifteen feet in the air, and plunged again into the trees, singing all the time a rapturous, thrilling song, bewitching both in manner and in tone.