醒来的森林

醒来的森林

CHAPTER 7 THE BLUEBIRD
书名: 醒来的森林 作者: (美) 约翰.巴勒斯 本章字数: 15766 更新时间: 2024-06-13 16:22:45

When Nature made the bluebird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast, and ordained that his appearance in the spring should denote that the strife and war between these two elements was at an end. He is the peace-harbinger; in him the celestial and terrestrial strike hands and are fast friends. He means the furrow and he means the warmth; he means all the soft, wooing influences of the spring on one hand, and the retreating footsteps of winter on the other.

It is sure to be a bright March morning when you first hear his note; and it is as if the milder influences up above had found a voice and let a word fall upon your ear, so tender is it and so prophetic, a hope tinged with a regret.

“Bermuda! Bermuda! Bermuda!” he seems to say, as if both invoking and lamenting, and, behold! Bermuda follows close, though the little pilgrim may only be repeating the tradition of his race, himself having come only from Florida, the Carolinas, or even from Virginia, where he has found his Bermuda on some broad sunny hillside thickly studded with cedars and persimmon-trees.

In New York and in New England the sap starts up in the sugar maple the very day the bluebird arrives, and sugar-making begins forthwith. The bird is generally a mere disembodied voice; a rumor in the air for tow of three days before it takes visible shape before you. The males are the pioneers, and come several days in advance of the females. By the time both are here and the pairs have begun to prospect for a place to nest, sugar-making is over, the last vestige of snow has disappeared, and the plow is brightening its mouldboard in the new furrow.
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