If you will go to some pond when spring is ending or summer beginning, and find among the water-grasses such an insect as I have told you of, you may see all this for yourselves; and you will say with me, dear children, that nothing you have ever known is more wonderful.

THE TALK OF THE TREES THAT STAND IN THE VILLAGE STREET

How still it is!  Nobody in the village street, the children all at school, and the very dogs sleeping lazily in the sunshine.  Only a south wind blows lightly through the trees, lifting the great fans of the horse-chestnut, tossing the slight branches of the elm against the sky like single feathers of a great plume, and swinging out fragrance from the heavy-hanging linden-blossoms.

Through the silence there is a little murmur, like a low song.  It is the song of the trees:  each has its own voice, which may be known from all others by the ear that has learned how to listen.

The topmost branches of the elm are talking of the sky,—­of those highest white clouds that float like tresses of silver hair in the far blue, of the sunrise gold and the rose-color of sunset that always rest upon them most lovingly.  But down deep in the heart of the great branches you may hear something quite different, and not less sweet.

“Peep under my leaves,” sings the elm-tree, “out at the ends of my broadest branches.  What hangs there so soft and gray?  Who comes with a flash of wings and gleam of golden breast among the dark leaves, and sits above the gray hanging nest to sing his full, sweet tune?  Who worked there together so happily all the May-time, with gray honeysuckle fibres, twining the little nest, until there it hung securely over the road, bound and tied and woven firmly to the slender twigs? so slender that the squirrels even cannot creep down for the eggs; much less can Jack or Neddy, who are so fond of birds’-nesting, ever hope to reach the home of our golden robin.

“There my leaves shelter him like a roof from rain and from sunshine.  I rock the cradle when the father and mother are away and the little ones cry, and in my softest tone I sing to them; yet they are never quite satisfied with me, but beat their wings, and stretch out their heads, and cannot be happy until they hear their father.

“The squirrel, who lives in the hole where the two great branches part, hears what I say, and curls up his tail, while he turns his bright eyes towards the swinging nest which he can never reach.”

The fanning wind wafts across the road the voice of the old horse-chestnut, who also has a word to say about the birds’-nests.