away,--to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have
for rooks. At Shady Hill(1) (now, alas! empty of its so long-loved
household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery
than their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned
tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting
their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events
of the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as
martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never
meddled with my corn, so far as I could discover.

(1) The home of the Nortons, in Cambridge, who were at the time
of this paper in Europe.

For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an irresistible bait
for boys, and their settlement was broken up. They grew so
wonted as to throw off a great part of their shyness, and to tolerate
my near approach. One very hot day I stood for some time within
twenty feet of a mother and three children, who sat on an elm
bough over my head gasping in the sultry air, and holding their
wings half-spread for coolness. All birds during the pairing season
become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a
tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their
habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear him
trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint Preux(1) standard has
something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.
Yet there are few things to my ear more melodious than his caw of
a clear winter morning as it drops to you filtered through five
hundred fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller birds
makes the moral character of the row, for all his deaconlike
demeanor and garb, somewhat questionable. He could never sally