field.

"And thou shalt have goat's milk enough for thy food, for the food
of thy household, and for the maintenance for thy maidens."




IV

IN THE HEMLOCKS


Most people receive with incredulity a statement of the number of
birds that annually visit our climate. Very few even are aware of
half the number that spend the summer in their own immediate
vicinity. We little suspect, when we walk in the woods, whose
privacy we are intruding upon,--what rare and elegant visitants from
Mexico, from Central and South America, and from the islands of the
sea, are holding their reunions in the branches over our heads, or
pursuing their pleasure on the ground before us.

I recall the altogether admirable and shining family which Thoreau
dreamed he saw in the upper chambers of Spaulding's woods, which
Spaulding did not know lived there, and which were not put out when
Spaulding, whistling, drove his team through their lower halls. They
did not go into society in the village; they were quite well; they
had sons and daughters; they neither wove nor spun; there was a
sound as of suppressed hilarity.