Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/54

36 and cheerful body. Just beyond him a scarlet tanager is posed on a low, leafless twig. Like the pine leaves, he looks out of condition. I am sure I have seen brighter ones. He is silent, but his mate, somewhere in the oak branches over my head, keeps up an emphatic chip-cherr, chip-cherr. Yes, I see her now, and the red one has gone up to perch at her side. She cocks her head, looking at me first out of one eye and then out of the other, and repeats the operation two or three times, like a puzzled microscopist squinting at a doubtful specimen; and all the while she continues to call, though I know nothing of what she means. Once her mate approaches too near, and she opens her bill at him in silence. He understands the sign and keeps his distance. I admire his spirit. It is better than taking a city.

The earliest of the yellow gerardias is in bloom, and a pretty desmodium, also (D. nudiflorum), with a loose raceme of small pink flowers, like miniature sweet-pea blossoms, on a slender leafless stalk. These are in the wood, amidst the underbrush. As I come out into a dry, grassy field I find the