Yet while we were actually on the river, paddling and floating downstream along the reaches of swift, smooth water, it was very lovely.  When we started in the morning the day was overcast and the air was heavy with vapor.  Ahead of us the shrouded river stretched between dim walls of forest, half seen in the mist.  Then the sun burned up the fog, and loomed through it in a red splendor that changed first to gold and then to molten white.  In the dazzling light, under the brilliant blue of the sky, every detail of the magnificent forest was vivid to the eye:  the great trees, the network of bush ropes, the caverns of greenery, where thick-leaved vines covered all things else.  Wherever there was a hidden boulder the surface of the current was broken by waves.  In one place, in midstream, a pyramidal rock thrust itself six feet above the surface of the river.  On the banks we found fresh Indian sign.

At home in Vermont Cherrie is a farmer, with a farm of six hundred acres, most of it woodland.  As we sat at the foot of the rapids, watching for the last dugouts with their naked paddlers to swing into sight round the bend through the white water, we talked of the northern spring that was just beginning.  He sells cream, eggs, poultry, potatoes, honey, occasionally pork and veal; but at this season it was the time for the maple sugar crop.  He has a sugar orchard, where he taps twelve hundred trees and hopes soon to tap as many more in addition.  Said Cherrie:  “It’s a busy time now for Fred Rice”—­Fred Rice is the hired man, and in sugar time the Cherrie boys help him with enthusiasm, and, moreover, are paid with exact justice for the work they do.  There is much wild life about the farm, although it is near Brattleboro.  One night in early spring a bear left his tracks near the sugar house; and now and then in summer Cherrie has had to sleep in the garden to keep the deer away from the beans, cabbages, and beets.

There was not much bird life in the forest, but Cherrie kept getting species new to the collection.  At this camp he shot an interesting little ant-thrush.  It was the size of a warbler, jet-black, with white under-surfaces of the wings and tail, white on the tail-feathers, and a large spot of white on the back, normally almost concealed, the feathers on the back being long and fluffy.  When he shot the bird, a male, it was showing off before a dull-colored little bird, doubtless the female; and the chief feature of the display was this white spot on the back.  The white feathers were raised and displayed so that the spot flashed like the “chrysanthemum” on a prongbuck whose curiosity has been aroused.  In the gloom of the forest the bird was hard to see, but the flashing of this patch of white feathers revealed it at once, attracting immediate attention.  It was an excellent example of a coloration mark which served a purely advertising purpose; apparently it was part of a courtship display.  The bird was about thirty feet up in the branches.