they, with bits of wool, tinsel, and feather, copy the real
dipterous, hymenopterous, or orthopterous insect? And the birds:
he knew them as do few ornithologists, by sight, by sound, by
little ways and tricks of their own, known only to themselves and
him. The white-throat sparrow with its sweet, far-reaching chant;
the hermit-thrush with its chime of bells in the calm summer
twilight; the vesper-sparrow that ran before him as he crossed the
meadow, or sang for hours, as he fished the stream, its unvarying,
but scarcely monotonous little strain; the cedar-bird, with its
smooth brown coast of Quaker simplicity, and speech as brief and
simple as Quaker yea or nay; the winter-wren sending out his
strange, lovely, liquid warble from the high, rocky side of Cannon
Mountain; the bluebird of the early spring, so welcome to the
winter-weary dwellers in that land of ice and show, as he

"From the bluer deeps
Lets fall a quick, prophetic strain,"

of summer, of streams freed and flowing again, of waking, darting,
eager fish; the veery, the phoebe, the jay, the vireo,--all these
were friends, familiar, tried and true to Fishin' Jimmy. The cluck
and coo of the cuckoo, the bubbling song of bobolink in buff and
black, the watery trill of the stream-loving swamp-sparrow, the
whispered whistle of the stealthy, darkness-haunting whippoorwill,
the gurgle and gargle of the cow-bunting,--he knew each and all,
better than did Audubon, Nuttall, or Wilson. But he never dreamed
that even the tiniest of his little favorites bore, in the
scientific world, far away from that quiet mountain nest, such
names as Troglodytes hyemalis or Melospiza palustris. He could
tell you, too, of strange, shy creatures rarely seen except by the