Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/107

 *old growth that yearly adds to its girth and stature.

Nor, one fancies, need these trees again fear the sweep of the woodchopper's axe. The spirit of reverence for its shores, which through the one-time hermit of Walden has spread to us all, should prevent that. For now the pond is much as Thoreau remembered it had been in his boyhood, walled in by dense forests, a place of echoes. Your spoken word comes back to you from this shore and from that, refined and made more sonorous, as if the wood gods would fain teach you oratory and had taken your phrase into their own mouths and put it forth again as an example. To your ears it comes again sweetened with the gentle essences of juniper, birch and sassafras, rich with the melodies taught to bare boughs by winter winds. In the haze of the August noon these other shores are distant to the eye. The sight must swim a long way through the quivering air to reach one or the other. The hearing, thanks to the kindly offices of the wood gods, leaps the space at a bound.

The kingfisher seems as much a familiar of the