up the heart with the sportsman's ineradicable instinct. They have
now gone farther northward, but will visit us again in autumn.

The smaller birds,--the little songsters of the woods, and those
that haunt man's dwellings and claim human friendship by building
their nests under the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees,--
these require a touch more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to
do them justice. Their outburst of melody is like a brook let loose
from wintry chains. We need not deem it a too high and solemn word
to call it a hymn of praise to the Creator; since Nature, who
pictures the reviving year in so many sights of beauty, has
expressed the sentiment of renewed life in no other sound save the
notes of these blessed birds. Their music, however, just now, seems
to be incidental, and not the result of a set purpose. They are
discussing the economy of life and love and the site and
architecture of their summer residences, and have no time to sit on
a twig and pour forth solemn hymns, or overtures, operas,
symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked; grave
subjects are settled in quick and animated debate; and only by
occasional accident, as from pure ecstasy, does a rich warble roll
its tiny waves of golden sound through the atmosphere. Their little
bodies are as busy as their voices; they are all a constant flutter
and restlessness. Even when two or three retreat to a tree-top to
hold council, they wag their tails and heads all the time with the
irrepressible activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their
brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal age of
sluggish man. The blackbirds, three species of which consort
together, are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great
companies of them--more than the famous "four-and-twenty" whom
Mother Goose has immortalized--congregate in contiguous treetops and