birds and the flowers. The stream can show you, better than any other
teacher, how nature works her enchantments with colour and music.

Go out to the Beaver-kill

"In the tassel-time of spring,"

and follow its brimming waters through the budding forests, to that
corner which we call the Painter's Camp. See how the banks are all
enamelled with the pale hepatica, the painted trillium, and the delicate
pink-veined spring beauty. A little later in the year, when the ferns
are uncurling their long fronds, the troops of blue and white violets
will come dancing down to the edge of the stream, and creep venturously
out to the very end of that long, moss-covered log in the water. Before
these have vanished, the yellow crow-foot and the cinquefoil will
appear, followed by the star-grass and the loose-strife and the golden
St. John's-wort. Then the unseen painter begins to mix the royal colour
on his palette, and the red of the bee-balm catches your eye. If you
are lucky, you may find, in midsummer, a slender fragrant spike of
the purple-fringed orchis, and you cannot help finding the universal
self-heal. Yellow returns in the drooping flowers of the jewel-weed,
and blue repeats itself in the trembling hare-bells, and scarlet is
glorified in the flaming robe of the cardinal-flower. Later still, the
summer closes in a splendour of bloom, with gentians and asters and
goldenrod.

You never get so close to the birds as when you are wading quietly down
a little river, casting your fly deftly under the branches for the wary
trout, but ever on the lookout for all the various pleasant things that
nature has to bestow upon you. Here you shall come upon the cat-bird at