"Such is the story of the Boblink; once spiritual, musical, admired,
the joy of the meadows, and the favourite bird of spring; finally a
gross little sensualist who expiates his sensuality in the larder.
His story contains a moral, worthy the attention of all little birds
and little boys; warning them to keep to those refined and
intellectual pursuits which raised him to so high a pitch of
popularity during the early part of his career; but to eschew all
tendency to that gross and dissipated indulgence, which brought this
mistaken little bird to an untimely end."--WASHINGTON IRVING:
Wolfert's Roost.

The Swiftwater brook was laughing softly to itself as it ran through
a strip of hemlock forest on the edge of the Woodlings' farm.  Among
the evergreen branches overhead the gayly-dressed warblers,--little
friends of the forest,--were flitting to and fro, lisping their June
songs of contented love: milder, slower, lazier notes than those in
which they voiced the amourous raptures of May.  Prince's Pine and
golden loose-strife and pink laurel and blue hare-bells and purple-
fringed orchids, and a score of lovely flowers were all abloom.  The
late spring had hindered some; the sudden heats of early summer had
hastened others; and now they seemed to come out all together, as if
Nature had suddenly tilted up her cornucopia and poured forth her
treasures in spendthrift joy.

I lay on a mossy bank at the foot of a tree, filling my pipe after a
frugal lunch, and thinking how hard it would be to find in any
quarter of the globe a place more fair and fragrant than this hidden
vale among the Alleghany Mountains.  The perfume of the flowers of
the forest is more sweet and subtle than the heavy scent of tropical
blossoms.  No lily-field in Bermuda could give a fragrance half so
magical as the fairy-like odour of these woodland slopes, soft
carpeted with the green of glossy vines above whose tiny leaves, in
delicate profusion,

     "The slight Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads."