white and green spray breaks above you; then, like a devotee before a
shrine or naming his beads, your rosary strung with luscious berries;
anon you are a grazing Nebuchadnezzar, or an artist taking an inverted
view of the landscape.

The birds are alarmed by your close scrutiny of their domain. They
hardly know whether to sing or to cry, and do a little of both. The
bobolink follows you and circles above and in advance of you, and is
ready to give you a triumphal exit from the field, if you will only
depart.

"Ye boys that gather flowers and strawberries,
Lo, hid within the grass, an adder lies,"

Warton makes Virgil sing; and Montaigne, in his "Journey to Italy,"
says: "The children very often are afraid, on account of the snakes, to
go and pick the strawberries that grow in quantities on the mountains
and among bushes." But there is no serpent here,--at worst, only a
bumblebee's or yellow-jacket's nest. You soon find out the spring in
the corner of the field under the beechen tree. While you wipe your
brow and thank the Lord for spring water, you glance at the initials in
the bark, some of them so old that they seem runic and legendary. You
find out, also, how gregarious the strawberry is,--that the different
varieties exist in little colonies about the field. When you strike the
outskirts of one of these plantations, how quickly you work toward the
centre of it, and then from the centre out, then circumnavigate it, and
follow up all its branchings and windings!

Then the delight in the abstract and in the concrete of strolling and
lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or