their reach, as a safe general principle.  The town boys, too!  They know the wood—­that is to say, they know where the wild fruits grow, and how to chase the squirrel, and rob the birds’ nests, and snare the birds.  Well, well, my children; to know and love a wood truly, it may be that one must live in it as I have done; and then a lifetime will scarcely reveal all its beauties, or exhaust its lessons.  But even then, one must have eyes that see, and ears that hear, or one misses a good deal.  It was in the wood that I heard this story that I shall tell you.”

“How did you hear it?” asked the children.

“A thrush sang it to me one night.”

“One night?” said the children.  “Then you mean a nightingale.”

“I mean a thrush,” said the old man.  “Do I not know the note of one bird from another?  I tell you that pine-tree by my cottage has a legend of its own, and the topmost branch is haunted.  Must all legends be about the loves and sorrows of our self-satisfied race alone?”

“But did you really and truly hear it?” they asked.  “I heard it,” said the old man.  “But, as I tell you, one hears and one hears.  I don’t say that everybody would have heard it, merely by sleeping in my chamber; but, for the benefit of the least imaginative, I will assure you that it is founded on fact.”

“Begin! begin!” shouted the children.

“Once upon a time,” said the old man, “there was a young thrush, who was born in that beautiful dingle where we last planted the ——­ fern.  His home-nest was close to the ground, but the lower one is, the less fear of falling; and in woods, the elevation at which you sleep is a matter of taste, and not of expense or gentility.  He awoke to life when the wood was dressed in the pale fresh green of early summer; and believing, like other folk, that his own home was at least the principal part of the world, earth seemed to him so happy and so beautiful an abode, that his heart felt ready to burst with joy.  The ecstasy was almost pain, till wings and a voice came to him.  Then, one day, when, after a grey morning, the sun came out at noon, drawing the scent from the old pine that looks in at my bedroom window, his joy burst forth, after long silence, into song, and flying upwards, he sat on the topmost branch of the pine, and sang as loud as he could sing to the sun and the blue sky.

“‘Joy! joy!’ he sang.  ’Fresh water and green woods, ambrosial sunshine and sunflecked shade, chattering brooks and rustling leaves, glade, and sward, and dell.  Lichens and cool mosses, feathered ferns and flowers.  Green leaves!  Green leaves!  Summer! summer! summer!’

“It was monotonous, but every word came from the singer’s heart, which is not always the case.  Thenceforward, though he slept near the ground, he went up every day to this pine, as to some sacred high place, and sang the same song, of which neither he nor I were ever weary.