Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/203

Rh on the sides of hills and ledges. You smell the summer from afar. The warmth makes a man young again. There is also some dryness, almost dustiness, in the roads. The mountains are white with snow. When the wind is northwest, it is now wintry, bat now it is more westerly. The edges of the mountains now melt into the sky. It is affecting to be put into communication with such distant objects by the power of vision, actually to look into such lands of promise. In this spring breeze, how full of life the silvery pines, probably the under sides of their leaves. The canoe-birch sprouts are red or salmon-colored like those of the common, but soon they cast off their salmon-colored jackets, and come forth with a white, but naked look, all dangling with ragged reddish curls. What is that little bird that makes so much use of these curls in its nest lined with coarse grass?

In a stubble field started up a bevy (about twenty) of quail which went off to some young pitch pines with a whirr like a shot, the plump round birds. The red polls are still numerous. (Have not seen them again, March 28th.)

March 20, 1855. It is remarkable by what a gradation of days which we call pleasant and warm, beginning in the last of February, we come at last to real summer warmth. At first