wn into a rage
had any one made such a remark to him.

"I stayed a while in the rice fields," he answered. "And if I hadn't
come away when I did," he added with a laugh, "I'd have been too fat to
fly way up here to Pleasant Valley."

Then a torrent of notes came tumbling out of his throat as he darted
right over the head of old Mr. Crow (who stood on a hillock) and swerved
and zigzagged and wheeled through the air, until Mr. Crow almost tied
his neck into a knot, just watching him.

"By the way," Mr. Meadowlark said in an undertone to Mr. Red-winged
Blackbird, "our friend Bobby has a different suit from the one he wore
when I last saw him."

"When was that?" Mr. Red-winged Blackbird inquired.

"About the middle of last summer!" Mr. Meadowlark explained.

"Ah! This is the second suit he has had since then," said Mr. Red-winged
Blackbird. "If you had been with us in the swamp last fall you'd have
known that Bobby had a new one then. And here he is now with still
another."

Mr. Meadowlark looked a bit troubled.

"I liked the black one--the black one with the white and buff
trimmings," he remarked. "It was very becoming to Bobby Bobolink. I was
hoping he'd wear one like it this summer."

"Wait!" was Mr. Red-winged Blackbird's mysterious answer. "Wait! And I
promise you won't be disappointed."

"Anyhow, he sings as well as ever," Mr. Meadowlark declared.

IV

SINGING FOR SOME ONE

THE first few days of early May had passed and with them had
flitted--somewhere--most of the jolly company in which Bobby Bobolink
had journeyed from the South. But a few of those merrymakers had
stayed--as Bobby did--in Farmer Green's meadow. They had made up their
minds to spend the summer in Pleasant Valley.

Even old Mr. Crow, who was no lover of music, had to admit that he had
never heard such bursts of song during all the summers he had spent in
the neighborhood. It seemed as if Bobby Bobolink and his companions
were trying their best to out-sing one another, though nobody knew why
they should do that.

But at last somebody discovered the reason. That rowdy of the woods,
Jasper Jay, spied upon the harum-scarum singers one day, when they were
all but bursting themselves in a frenzy of song. And he saw that they
were giving what Jasper called "a serenade."

They were singing not for themselves but for a dull, yellowish-brown
lady of their own sort, who had not arrived from the South until Bobby
and his friends had