mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in
Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here till last July,
when I found a female busy among my raspberries and surprisingly
bold. I hope she was *prospecting* with a view to settlement in
our garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit,
and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win over so
delightful a neighbor.

(1) Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales, Prologue,* line 11.

The return of the robin is commonly announced by the
newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-
place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his
appearance in the orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite
of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I
have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 degrees below
zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably within,(1) like Emerson's
Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation
among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of
cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song
is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose.
His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance
which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never
has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird
and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's
a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came
out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly
forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature.
He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many
successive committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats