Singing of a field finch--Concert-singing in birds--Old John--Cow-
birds' singing--Arrival of summer migrants.



I remember--better than any orchard, grove, or wood I have ever
entered or seen, do I remember that shady oasis of trees at my new
home on the illimitable grassy plain. Up till now I had never lived
with trees excepting those twenty-five I have told about and that
other one which was called _el arbol_ because it was the only tree of
its kind in all the land. Here there were hundreds, thousands of
trees, and to my childish unaccustomed eyes it was like a great
unexplored forest. There were no pines, firs, nor eucalyptus (unknown
in the country then), nor evergreens of any kind; the trees being all
deciduous were leafless now in mid-winter, but even so it was to me a
wonderful experience to be among them, to feel and smell their rough
moist bark stained green with moss, and to look up at the blue sky
through the network of interlacing twigs. And spring with foliage and
blossom would be with us by and by, in a month or two; even now in
midwinter there was a foretaste of it, and it came to us first as a
delicious fragrance in the air at one spot beside a row of old
Lombardy poplars--an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh
the heart glad to the adult. Here at the roots of the poplars there
was a bed or carpet of round leaves which we knew well, and putting
the clusters apart with our hands, lo! there were the violets already
open--the dim, purple-blue, hidden violets, the earliest, sweetest, of
all flowers the most loved by children in that land, and doubtless in
many other lands.

There was more than time enough for us small children to feast on