pewees left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the
messmates of the Ancient Mariner(1) did towards him after he had
shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at last, and one of
them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can
hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing with the
unerring precision a stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her
smaller deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning;
and during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of
*pewee* with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He
saddens with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his
note to *cheu, pewee!* as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian
bird, Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is
so familiar as often to pursue a fly through the open window into
my library.

(1) In Coleridge's poem of that name.

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old
friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had,
at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs, and to
which I cannot say,

"Many light hearts and wings,
Which now be head, lodged in thy living bowers."

My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I
to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying-
time the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of
*scythe-whet.* I protect my game as jealously as an English
squire. If anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's nest I know of