machines than any other birds I know. The enormous mouth feeds an enormous
stomach, and this, like a fire-box, makes the power that works the
enormous wings. From a single maw have been taken eighteen hundred winged
ants, to say nothing of the smaller fry that could not be identified and
counted.

But if he never caught an ant, never one of the fifth-story mosquitos that
live and bite till Christmas, how greatly still my sky would need him! His
flight is song enough. His cry and eery thunder are the very voice of the
summer twilight to me. And as I watch him coasting in the evening dusk,
that twilight often falls--over the roofs, as it used to fall for me over
the fields and the quiet hollow woods.

There is always an English sparrow on my roof--which does not particularly
commend the roof to bird-lovers, I know. I often wish the sparrow an
entirely different bird, but I never wish him entirely away from the roof.
When there is no other defense for him, I fall back upon his being a
bird. Any kind of a bird in the city! Any but a parrot.

A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves-trough, so close to the roof
that I can overhear their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar Cock
Sparrow is a family man--so entirely a family man as to be nothing else at
all. He is a success, too. It does me good to see him build. He tore the
old nest all away in the early winter, so as to be ready. There came a
warm springish day in February, and he began. A blizzard stopped him, but
with the melting of the snow he went to work again, completing the nest by
the middle of March.

He built for a big family, and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but _them_; for
there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the