y Frog, less than an inch long.

"Ther's your Whistling Lizard: he no a Lizard at all, but a Froggie.
Book men call him _Hyla pickeringii_, an' a gude Scotchman he'd
make, for ye see the St. Andrew's cross on his wee back. Ye see the
whistling ones in the water put on'y their beaks oot an' is hard to
see. Then they sinks to the bottom when ye come near. But you tak
this'n home and treat him well and ye'll see him blow out his throat
as big as himsel' an' whistle like a steam engine."

Yan thawed out now. He told about the Lizard he had seen.

"That wasna a Lizard; Ah niver see thim aboot here. It must a been
a two-striped _Spelerpes_. A _Spelerpes_ is nigh kin to a
Frog--a kind of dry-land tadpole, while a Lizard is only a Snake with
legs."

This was light from heaven. All Yan's distrust was gone. He warmed to
the stranger. He plied him with questions; he told of his getting the
Bird Book. Oh, how the stranger did snort at "that driveling trash."
Yan talked of his perplexities. He got a full hearing and intelligent
answers. His mystery of the black ground-bird with a brown mate was
resolved into the Common Towhee. The unknown wonderful voice in the
spring morning, sending out its "_cluck, cluck, cluck, clucker_,"
in the distant woods, the large gray Woodpecker that bored in some
high stub and flew in a blaze of gold, and the wonderful spotted bird
with red head and yellow wings and tail in the taxidermist's window,
were all resolved into one and the same--the Flicker or Golden-winged
Woodpecker. The Hang-nest and the Oriole became one. The unknown
poisonous-looking blue Hornet, that sat on the mud with palpitating
body, and the strange, invisible thing that made the mud-nests inside
old outbuildings and crammed them with crippled Spiders, were both
identified as the Mud-wasp or _Pelopaeus_.

A black Butterfly flew over, and Yan learned that it was a Camberwell
Beauty, or, scientifically, a _Vanessa antiopa_, and that this
one must have hibernated to be seen so early in the spring, and yet
more, that this beautiful creature was the glorified spirit of the
common brown and black spiney Caterpillar.

The Wild Pigeons were flying high above them in great flocks as they
sat there, and Yan learned of their great nesting places in the far
South, and of their wonderful but exact migrations without regard to
anything but food; their northward migration to gather the winged nuts
of the Slippery Elm in Canada; their August