The
familiar delicious perfume fills the barns and lanes. As you go along
you see the fields of grayish white slightly tinged with yellow, the
loosely stack'd grain, the slow-moving wagons passing, and farmers in
the fields with stout boys pitching and loading the sheaves. The corn
is about beginning to tassel. All over the middle and southern states
the spear-shaped battalia, multitudinous, curving, flaunting--long,
glossy, dark-green plumes for the great horseman, earth. I hear the
cheery notes of my old acquaintance Tommy quail; but too late for the
whip-poor-will, (though I heard one solitary lingerer night before
last.) I watch the broad majestic flight of a turkey-buzzard,
sometimes high up, sometimes low enough to see the lines of his form,
even his spread quills, in relief against the sky. Once or twice
lately I have seen an eagle here at early candle-light flying low.
AN UNKNOWN
_June 15_.--To-day I noticed a new large bird, size of a nearly grown
hen--a haughty, white-bodied dark-wing'd hawk--I suppose a hawk from
his bill and general look--only he had a clear, loud, quite musical,
sort of bell-like call, which he repeated again and again, at
intervals, from a lofty dead tree-top, overhanging the water. Sat
there a long time, and I on the opposite bank watching him. Then he
darted down, skimming pretty close to the stream--rose slowly, a
magnificent sight, and sail'd with steady wide-spread wings, no
flapping at all, up and down the pond two or three times, near me, in
circles in clear sight, as if for my delectation.
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