Yan thawed out now.  He told about the Lizard he had seen.

“That wasna a Lizard; Ah niver see thim aboot here.  It must a been a two-striped Spelerpes.  A Spelerpes is nigh kin to a Frog—­a kind of dry-land tadpole, while a Lizard is only a Snake with legs.”

This was light from heaven.  All Yan’s distrust was gone.  He warmed to the stranger.  He plied him with questions; he told of his getting the Bird Book.  Oh, how the stranger did snort at “that driveling trash.”  Yan talked of his perplexities.  He got a full hearing and intelligent answers.  His mystery of the black ground-bird with a brown mate was resolved into the Common Towhee.  The unknown wonderful voice in the spring morning, sending out its “cluck, cluck, cluck, clucker,” in the distant woods, the large gray Woodpecker that bored in some high stub and flew in a blaze of gold, and the wonderful spotted bird with red head and yellow wings and tail in the taxidermist’s window, were all resolved into one and the same—­the Flicker or Golden-winged Woodpecker.  The Hang-nest and the Oriole became one.  The unknown poisonous-looking blue Hornet, that sat on the mud with palpitating body, and the strange, invisible thing that made the mud-nests inside old outbuildings and crammed them with crippled Spiders, were both identified as the Mud-wasp or Pelopaeus.

A black Butterfly flew over, and Yan learned that it was a Camberwell Beauty, or, scientifically, a Vanessa antiopa, and that this one must have hibernated to be seen so early in the spring, and yet more, that this beautiful creature was the glorified spirit of the common brown and black spiney Caterpillar.

The Wild Pigeons were flying high above them in great flocks as they sat there, and Yan learned of their great nesting places in the far South, and of their wonderful but exact migrations without regard to anything but food; their northward migration to gather the winged nuts of the Slippery Elm in Canada; their August flight to the rice-fields of Carolina; their Mississippi Valley pilgrimage when the acorns and beech-mast were falling ripe.

What a rich, full morning that was.  Everything seemed to turn up for them.  As they walked over a piney hill, two large birds sprang from the ground and whirred through the trees.

“Ruffed Grouse or ‘patridge’, as the farmers call them.  There’s a pair lives nigh aboots here.  They come on this bank for the Wintergreen berries.”

And Yan was quick to pull and taste them.  He filled his pockets with the aromatic plant—­berries and all—­and chewed it as he went.  While they walked, a faint, far drum-thump fell on their ears.  “What’s that?” he exclaimed, ever on the alert.  The stranger listened and said: 

“That’s the bird ye ha’ just seen; that’s the Cock Partridge drumming for his mate.”

The Pewee of his early memories became the Phoebe of books.  That day his brookside singer became the Song-sparrow; the brown triller, the Veery Thrush.  The Trilliums, white and red, the Dogtooth Violet, the Spring-beauty, the Trailing Arbutus—­all for the first time got names and became real friends, instead of elusive and beautiful, but depressing mysteries.