One is the impression made upon me by a redbird
which the "hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a
pail of chips. She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground.
That vivid bit of color in the form of a bird has never faded from my
mind, though I could not have been more than three or four years old.
Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin,"
in the chapter called "The Invitation,"--the vision of the small
bluish bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was
six or seven years old, while roaming with my brothers in the
"Deacon woods" near home. The memory of that bird stuck to me
as a glimpse of a world of birds that I knew not of.
Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must
have occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an
older boy neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods
when a brown bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front
of us. "A brown thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless
either the veery, or the hermit thrush, and this was my first clear
view of it. Thus it appears that birds stuck to me, impressed me
from the first. Very early in my life the coming of the bluebird,
the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the robin, in the spring, were
events that stirred my emotions, and gave a new color to the day.
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