and the juncos and the cross-bills make merry in the windswept
fields. In the lucent mornings of April you will hear your old
friends coming home to you, Phoebe, and Oriole, and
Yellow-Throat, and Red-Wing, and Tanager, and Cat-Bird. When
they call to you and greet you, you will understand that Nature
knows a secret for which man has never found a word--the secret
that tells itself in song.

The third of the forest-vines is Wood-Magic. It bears neither
flower nor fruit. Its leaves are hardly to be distinguished
from the leaves of the other vines. Perhaps they are a little
rounder than the Snowberry's, a little more pointed than the
Partridge-berry's; sometimes you might mistake them for the
one, sometimes for the other. No marks of warning have been
written upon them. If you find them it is your fortune; if
you taste them it is your fate.

For as you browse your way through the forest, nipping
here and there a rosy leaf of young winter-green, a fragrant
emerald tip of balsam-fir, a twig of spicy birch, if by chance
you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and eat them, you will not
know what you have done, but the enchantment of the tree-land
will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow
through your veins.

You will never get away from it. The sighing of the wind
through the pine-trees and the laughter of the stream in its
rapids will sound through all your dreams. On beds of silken
softness you will long for the sleep-song of whispering leaves
above your head, and the smell of a couch of balsam-boughs. At