condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much
above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and
forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs
and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. Our
winter is his summer. There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this
idiosyncrasy. His physical construction closely resembles that of his
insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no
discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not
seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain
unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of
the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots
where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the
snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests
a survival of the unfittest.

The movements of this tough little anti-Darwinian are overlapped by the
bluebird and the robin,--our robin, best entitled to the name, inasmuch
as it is accorded him by fifty-odd millions against thirty millions who
give it to the redbreast,--who are usually with him long before he gets
away. They never move very far southward, but watch the cantonments of
Frost, ready to advance the moment his outposts are drawn in and signs
appear of evacuation. Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter
rather by altitude than by latitude. The low swamps and pineries that
skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat. Thence
they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward
beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the
Hudson into an upper and a lower reach. Detachments of them extend their
tour to the Gulf. Readers of "A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans
in 1814-15" will recall his mention of the assemblage of robins hopping
over the Chalmette sward that were the first living inhabitants to