Robins led the singing along the creek.  They always do.  In New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan,—­everywhere it is the same,—­they out-number all rivals three to one.  It is necessary to listen closely in order to distinguish the other voices.  This particular morning, however, the wood-thrushes were all arranged up the copsy hillside at my back, and so reinforced each other that their part was not overborne by robin song.  One of the thrushes was perched upon a willow stub along the edge of the water, so near that I could see every flirt of his wings, could almost count the big spots in his sides.  Softly, calmly, with the purest joy he sang, pausing at the end of every few bars to preen and call.  His song was the soul of serenity, of all that is spiritual.  Accompanied by the lower, more continuous notes from among the trees, it rose, a clear, pure, wonderful soprano, lifting the whole wide chorus nearer heaven.

Farther along the creek, on the border of the swamp, the red-shouldered blackbirds were massed; chiming in everywhere sang the catbirds, white-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, orchard-orioles, and Maryland yellowthroats; and at short intervals, soaring for a moment high over the other voices, sounded the thrilling, throbbing notes of the cardinal, broken suddenly and drowned by the roll of the flicker, the wild, weird cry of the great-crested flycatcher, or the rapid, hay-rake rattle of the belted kingfisher.

All at once a narrow breeze cut a swath through the mist just across my bows, turned, spread, caught the severed cloud in which I was drifting, and whirled it up and away.  The head of the pond and the upper creek were still shrouded, while around me only breaths of the white flecked the water and the spatter-docks.  The breeze had not stirred a ripple; the current here in the broad of the pond was imperceptible; and I lay becalmed on the edge of the open channel, among the rank leaves and golden knobs of the docks.

A crowd of chimney-swallows gathered over the pond for a morning bath.  Half a hundred of them were wheeling, looping, and cutting about me in a perfect maze of orbits, as if so many little black shuttles had borrowed wings and gone crazy with freedom.  They had come to wash—­a very proper thing to do, for there are few birds or beasts that need it more.  It was highly fitting for sooty little Tom, seeing he had to turn into something, to become a Water Baby.  And if these smaller, winged sweeps of our American chimneys are contemplating a metamorphosis, it ought to be toward a similar life of soaking.

They must have been particularly sooty this morning.  One plunge apiece, so far from sufficing, seemed hardly a beginning.  They kept diving in over and over, continuing so long that finally I grew curious to know how many dips they were taking, and so, in order to count his dives, I singled one out, after most of the flock had done and gone off to hawk.  How many he had taken before I marked him, and how many more he took after I lost him among the other birds, I cannot say; but, standing up in the skiff, I followed him around and around until he made his nineteenth splash,—­in less than half as many minutes,—­when I got so groggy that his twentieth splash I came near taking with him.