The woods were cool and green and full of lovely light.  It was so still and peaceful, too!  The tiny queer noises all about, which once, before he knew the kingdom of the forest, had frightened him so much, now filled John with the keenest joy.  Often he paused and listened eagerly.  He liked to feel that he was surrounded everywhere by little brothers, seen and unseen.  With a word to Brutus, which made the dog lie down and keep perfectly quiet, John would steal forward softly and peer through a screen of bushes, or into a treetop, and watch the housekeeping of some shy brother beast or bird.  Once he flung himself flat on the ground, and lay for a long time eagerly watching the antics of a beetle.  A little later, with Brutus patiently beside him, he sat cross-legged for ten minutes, waiting to see how a certain big yellow spider would spin her web between two branches of a rose-bush.

They wandered on and on.  A great golden butterfly rose before them from a bed of lilies, and together he and Brutus ran after it; not to capture and kill it, oh no! for to John the wonder of the flower with wings lay in the life which gave it power to move about and pay calls upon the other blossoms that must be always stay-at-homes.  John chased it gaily, as one brother plays with another.  And when it lighted on a rose-bush or a yellow broom-flower, or poised on a swaying blade of grass, he crept up and admired its lovely colors without touching the fragile thing.  But at last, as if suddenly remembering an errand which it had forgotten, the butterfly soared quickly up and away over the treetops and out of sight.

“Good-by, little brother!” called John after it.  “I wish I could fly as you do and look down upon the kingdom of the forest!  Then indeed I would learn all the secrets of our friends up in the treetops there, who hide their nests so selfishly.  Oh, I should so love to see all the little baby birds!  To be sure, some that I have seen in the ground-nests are ugly enough.  Oh, the big mouths of them!  Oh, the bald skins and prickly pin-feathers!  Ha! ha!” John laughed so heartily that Brutus came running up to see what the joke was.  “O Brutus!” cried John.  “I think I know why the father and mother birds build their nests so high.  They are ashamed to have any one see their funny little ones before they are quite dressed!”

Brutus looked up in John’s face and seemed to smile.  The boy and the dog often had talks together in this wise.

“I think I will ask them,” said John.  “Now, Brutus, lie still.”  He gave a peculiar whistle, waited a moment, and repeated it, twice, thrice.  At the first call there was a fluttering in the branches overhead.  At the second call one saw the silhouettes of tiny bodies dropping from branch to branch ever nearer to the boy below.  At the third, there was a flutter, a rush of wings, and a flock of dear little birds came flying to John’s shoulder, to his out-stretched arms, to his head; so that presently he looked like a green bush which they had chosen for their perch.