I was not only nearer to some of those
which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those
smaller and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or
rarely, serenade a villager -- the wood thrush, the veery, the
scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many
others.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a
half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in
the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and
about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord
Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite
shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my
most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on
the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a
mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as
the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist,
and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth
reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were
stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the
breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.
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