tiny shining scales. Nibbling at the nut-like flesh, I am touched with
the nicety, the universality of nature's appeal to the finer senses
and sentiments. Here is form and color and sparkle to please the eye,
flesh tender to the touch, aroma that tests the subtlest sense of
smell, taste that recalls stories of Epicurean feasts, millions of
life-germs among the purple-black gills, ready to float in the streams
of the atmosphere to distant realms and other cycles of life. No dead
log and toadstools are here, but dainty shapes with billions of
possibilities for new life, new beauties, new thoughts.

* * * * *

[Illustration: YOUNG BLUE-JAY TRYING TO CLIMB BACK TO ITS NEST

"THE WOOD THRUSH HAS A LATE NEST IN A YOUNG ELM" (p. 41)

"THE CHIPMUNK HOLDS IN HIS PAWS A BIT OF BREAD" (p. 20)]

Goldfinches ride on the billows of the air, now folding their pinions
and shooting silently downward into the trough of the sea, then
opening their wings and beating their way upwards, singing meanwhile.
Going over the woods they fly twenty to thirty feet above the tops of
the tallest trees, but when they reach the meadow lands they drop
to about the same height above the surface of the ground. Only a few
of them are nesting yet. The tall thistle by the roadside is nearly
ten feet high, but its heads have not fully opened. They like its down
for their nests and its seeds to feed the fledgelings. They fly in
pairs often and in the evenings they cling prettily to the catnip by
the pasture fence, digging into each calyx for its four sweet nutlets.
The woodthrush has a late nest in a young elm; her first family was