fly over us riverwards, clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as
they go, and, in cloudy weather. scarce higher than the tops of the
chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to alight in one of our
trees, though for what purpose I never could divine. Kingfishers
have sometimes puzzled me in the same way, perched at high noon
in a pine, springing their watchman's rattle when they flitted away
from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads
along as a man does a wheelbarrow.

Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country is
growing less wild. I once found a summer duck's nest within a
quarter of a mile of our house, but such a *trouvaille* would be
impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere taming of the
neighborhood does not quite satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty
years ago, on my way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace
of woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a
house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth
of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy birds were
almost as indifferent to my passing as common poultry would have
been. Since bird-nesting has become scientific, and dignified itself
as oology, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our losses.
But some old friends are constant. Wilson's thrush comes every
year to remind me of that most poetic or ornithologists. He flits
before me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A
pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the
arched entrance to the ice-house; always on the same brick, and
never more than a single pair, though two broods of five each are
raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to the
homestead? By what right of primogeniture? Once the children of
a man employed about the place *oologized* the nest, and the