usually addressed to the ranks and means 'attention.'

Early in April there began to be great doings among the crows.
Some new cause of excitement seemed to have come on them.
They spent half the day among the pines, instead of foraging from
dawn till dark. Pairs and trios might be seen chasing each other,
and from time to time they showed off in various feats of flight. A
favorite sport was to dart down suddenly from a great height
toward some perching crow, and just before touching it to turn at a
hairbreadth and rebound in the air so fast that the wings of the
swooper whirred with a sound like distant thunder. Sometimes one
crow would lower his head, raise every feather, and coming close
to another would gurgle out a long note like. What did it all mean?
I soon learned. They were making love and pairing off. The males
were showing off their wing powers and their voices to the lady
crows. And they must have been highly appreciated, for by the
middle of April all had mated and had scattered over the country
for their honeymoon, leaving the sombre old pines of Castle Frank
deserted and silent.

II

The Sugar Loaf hill stands alone in the Don Valley. It is still
covered with woods that join with those of Castle Frank, a quarter
of a mile off. in the woods, between the two hills, is a pine-tree in
whose top is a deserted hawk's nest. Every Toronto school-boy
knows the nest, and, excepting that I had once shot a black squirrel
on its edge, no one had ever seen a sign of life about it. There it
was year after year, ragged and old, and falling to pieces. Yet,
strange to tell, in all that time it never did drop to pieces, like other