Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/249

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EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.
235

life. Our interest in our country, the spread of liberty, etc., strong, and as it were, innate as it is, cannot be as transient as our present existence here. It cannot be that all those patriots who. die in the midst of their career have no further connection with the career of their country.

March 26, 1857. As I lay on the fine dry sedge in the sun in a deep and sheltered hollow, I heard one fine, faint peep from over the windy ridge between the hollow in which I lay and the swamp, which at first I referred to a bird, and looked round at the bushes which crowned the brim of this hollow to find it, but erelong a regularly but faintly repeated phe, phe, phe, phe, revealed the Hylodes Pickeringii. It was like the light reflected from the mountain ridges within the shaded portion of the moon, forerunner and herald of the spring. You take your walk some pretty cold and windy, but sunny, March day through rustling woods, perhaps, glad to take shelter in the hollows or on the south side of hills or woods. When ensconced in some sunny and sheltered hollow with some just melted pool at its bottom, as you recline on the fine withered sedge in which the. mice have had their galleries, leaving it pierced with countless holes, and are, perchance, dreaming of spring there, a single dry,