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In later May, the season “betwixt May and June,” beauty and fragrance and melody comes in a rich flood.  The flaming breast of the oriole and the wondrous mingling of colors in the multiplied warblers glint like jewels among the ever enlarging leaves.  The light in the woodlands becomes more subdued and the carpet of ferns and flowers grows richer and more beautiful.  The vireos, the cardinal and the tanager add to the brilliancy and the ovenbird and veery to the melody.  As good old John Milton once wrote:  “In these vernal seasons of the year, when the air is clear and pleasant, it were an injury and a sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake of her rejoicing with heaven and earth.”

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The beauty of the world is at every man’s door, if he will only pause to see.  It offers every man real riches if only he will now and then quit his muckraking or pause from paying his life for a cap and bells.  It sweetens honest labor, helps earthly endeavor, strengthens human affection and leads the soul naturally from the beauty of this world to the greater beauty of that which is to come.

WALKS IN JUNE WOODS AND FIELDS

VI.  WALKS IN JUNE WOODS AND FIELDS.

Whether we look or whether we listen
We can hear life murmur or see it glisten.
—­LOWELL.

As we walk along the bank of the creek on a warm afternoon in June we realize how true are these lines of Lowell.  The frog chorus is dying down, though now and then we catch sight of a big fellow blowing out his big balloon throat and filling the air with a hoarse bass, while another across the creek has a bagpipe apparently as big but pitched in a higher key.  Two months ago one could not get near enough to see this queer inflation, but now the frogs do not seem so shy.  Garter snakes wiggle through the grass down the bank of the creek and the crickets are just beginning to chirp the love chorus which is soon to swell incessantly till the fall frosts come.  Butterflies, dragon flies, saw flies and gall flies are busy and we see evidences of their work in the crimson galls on the willow leaves and the purple-spotted oak apples, some of which have fallen to the ground from the scarlet oak above.  Nature’s first great law is the perpetuation of species, and everything we see in the June woods and fields, from the giant white oak to the busy ant, is diligently obeying that law.  The red-winged blackbird circles over our heads with sharp, anxious chirps, for we have disturbed the young red-wings down in the sedge who are taking their first lessons in flying.  The catbird’s nest, with four greenish-blue eggs, is in a wild gooseberry bush and the catbird is up among the shad-trees feasting on the ripening June berries.  The gentle notes of soft pedal music come floating sweetly down.