Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/20

6 February 25, 1859. Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse. I heard this morning a nuthatch in the elms on the street. I think they are heard oftener at the approach of spring, just as the phebe note of the chickadee is, and so their quah quah is a herald of the spring.

A good book is not made in the cheap and off-hand manner of many of our scientific reports, ushered in by the message of the President communicating it to Congress, and the order of Congress that many thousand copies be printed with the letters of instruction from the Secretary of the Interior (or rather exterior); the bulk of the book being a journal of a picnic or sporting expedition by a brevet lieutenant-colonel, illustrated by photographs of the traveler's footsteps across the plains, and an admirable engraving of his native village as it appeared on his leaving it, and followed by an appendix on the paleontology of the route by a distinguished savant who was not there; the last illustrated by very finely