and swallows seed-corn and noxious grubs with perfect
impartiality. He is not a mere pirate, living by plunder alone, but
rather like the old Phoenician sea-farer, indifferently honest or
robber as occasion serves,--and robber not from fierceness of
disposition, but merely from utter unscrupulousness as to means.

This is shown in his docility. A hawk or an eagle is never tamed, but
a crow is more easily and completely tamable than the gentlest
singing-bird. The one I have just spoken of, though hardly six months
from the nest, would allow himself to be handled by his owner, and
would suffer even a stranger to touch him. When I first came near the
house, he greeted me with a suppressed caw, and flew along some
hundred yards just over my head, looking down, first with one eye and
then with the other, to get a complete view of the stranger. Next
morning I became aware, when but half awake, of a sort of mewing sound
in the neighborhood, and at last looking around, I saw through the
window, which opened to the floor, my new acquaintance perched on the
porch roof, which was at the same level, turning his head from side to
side, and eyeing me through the glass with divers queer contortions
and gesticulations, reminding me of some odd, old, dried-up French
dancing-master, and with a varied succession of croakings, now high,
now low, evidently bent upon attracting my attention. When he had
succeeded, he flew off with loud, joyous caws to the top of the house,
where I heard him rolling nuts or acorns from the ridge, and flying to
catch them before they fell off.

Their independence of seasons is shown also in their habit of
associating in about equal numbers throughout the year. In the spring
the flocks are more noticeable, hovering about some grove of pines,
flying straight up in the air and swooping down again with an
uninterrupted cawing,--seemingly a sort of crow ball, with a view to
match-making. Afterwards they become more silent, and apparently more
solitary, but still fly out to their feeding-grounds morning and
evening; and if you sit down in the woods near one of their nests, the
uneasy choking chuckle, ending at last in the outright cawing of the
disturbed owner, will generally be answered from every point, and crow
after crow come edging up from tree to tree to see what is the matter.

Though all of the crow tribe are notorious for their harsh voices, yet
if the power of mimicry be considered as a mark of superior