Towards dark, having seen to the comfort of a household of kind, faithful fellow-beings, whom man in his vanity calls the lower animals, I went last to walk under the cedars in the front yard, listening to that music which is at once so cheery and so sad—­the low chirping of birds at dark winter twilights as they gather in from the frozen fields, from snow-buried shrubbery and hedge-rows, and settle down for the night in the depths of the evergreens, the only refuge from their enemies and shelter from the blast.  But this evening they made no ado about their home-coming.  To-day perhaps none had ventured forth.  I am most uneasy when the red-bird is forced by hunger to leave the covert of his cedars, since he, on the naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the most far-shining and beautiful mark for Death.  I stepped across to the tree in which a pair of these birds roost and shook it, to make sure they were at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the next with the quick startled notes they utter when aroused.

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other.  Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle.  At times the needle of my nature points towards the country.  On that side everything is poetry.  I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May.  At others the needle veers round, and I go to town—­to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.  That way nearly everything is prose.  I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sights.  And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner.  The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man.

Among my neighbors who furnish me much of the plain prose of life, the nearest hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner.  I called him my rain-cow, because the sound of his voice awoke apprehensions of falling weather.  A visit from him was an endless drizzle.  For Jacob came over to expound his minute symptoms; and had everything that he gave out on the subject of human ailments been written down, it must have made a volume as large, as solemn, and as inconvenient as a family Bible.  My other nearest neighbor lives across the road—­a widow, Mrs. Walters.  I call Mrs. Walters my mocking-bird, because she reproduces by what is truly a divine arrangement of the throat the voices of the town.  When she flutters across to the yellow settee under the grape-vine and balances herself lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favor me with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note of the village songsters.  After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins to flutter in a motherly way around the subject of my symptoms.