Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/300

This page has been validated.
286
EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.

gether, making the fullest and sweetest concert I have heard yet. Like a shopfull of canaries. About the size of a song-sparrow. I think these are the tree-sparrow. Also mixed with them, and puzzling me to distinguish for a long time, were many of the fox-colored (?) sparrows mentioned above, with a creamy, cinnamon-tinged, ashy breast, cinnamon shoulder-let, and ashy about side-head and throat, with a fox-colored tail. A size larger than the others, the spot on breast very marked. Here were evidently two birds intimately mixed. Did not Peabody confound them when he mentioned the mark on the breast of the tree-sparrow? The rich strain of the fox-colored sparrow, as I think it, added much to the choir. The latter, solos, the former, in concert. I kept off a hawk by my presence. They were a long time invisible to me except when they flitted past

Mount Tabor It is affecting to see a distant mountain top like the summits of Uncannunuc, well seen from this hill, whereon you camped for a night in your youth, which you have never revisited, still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it. It lies like an isle in the far heavens, a part of earth unprofaned, which does not bear a price in the market, is not advertised by the real estate broker.