He was quite alone so far as kindred were concerned, but that scarcely seemed a hardship.  Wherever he went he could see the jolly chickadees scrambling merrily about, and he remembered the time when they had seemed such big, important creatures.  They were the most absurdly cheerful things in the woods.  Before the autumn was fairly over they had begun to sing their famous refrain, ‘Spring Soon,’ and kept it up with good heart more or less all through the winter’s direst storms, till at length the waning of the Hungry Moon, our February, seemed really to lend some point to the ditty, and they redoubled their optimistic announcement to the world in an ‘I-told-you-so’ mood.  Soon good support was found, for the sun gained strength and melted the snow from the southern slope of Castle Frank Hill, and exposed great banks of fragrant wintergreen, whose berries were a bounteous feast for Redruff, and, ending the hard work of pulling frozen browse, gave his bill the needed chance to grow into its proper shape again.  Very soon the first bluebird came flying over and warbled as he flew ‘The spring is coming.’  The sun kept gaining, and early one day in the dark of the Wakening Moon of March there was a loud ‘Caw, caw,’ and old Silverspot, the king-crow, came swinging along from the south at the head of his troops and officially announced

     ‘THE SPRING HAS COME.’

All nature seemed to respond to this, the opening of the birds’ New Year, and yet it was something within that chiefly seemed to move them.  The chickadees went simply wild; they sang their ’Spring now, spring now now—­Spring now now,’ so persistently that one wondered how they found time to get a living.

And Redruff felt it thrill him through and through.  He sprang with joyous vigor on a stump and sent rolling down the little valley, again and again, a thundering ‘Thump, thump, thump, thunderrrrrrrrr,’ that wakened dull echoes as it rolled, and voiced his gladness in the coming of the spring.

Away down the valley was Cuddy’s shanty.  He heard the drum-call on the still morning air and ‘reckoned there was a cock patridge to git,’ and came sneaking up the ravine with his gun.  But Redruff skimmed away in silence, nor rested till once more in Mud Creek Glen.  And there he mounted the very log where first he had drummed and rolled his loud tattoo again and again, till a small boy who had taken a short cut to the mill through the woods, ran home, badly scared, to tell his mother he was sure the Indians were on the war-path, for he heard their war-drums beating in the glen.

Why does a happy boy holla?  Why does a lonesome youth sigh?  They don’t know any more than Redruff knew why every day now he mounted some dead log and thumped and thundered to the woods; then strutted and admired his gorgeous blazing ruffs as they flashed their jewels in the sunlight, and then thundered out again.  Whence now came the strange wish for someone else to admire the plumes?  And why had such a notion never come till the Pussywillow Moon?