rd is on the Wing."
OMAR KHAYYAM.

By the first of August the bird-lover's year is already on the wane. In
the chestnut grove, where a month ago the wood thrush, the rose-breasted
grosbeak, and the scarlet tanager were singing, the loiterer now hears
nothing but the wood pewee's pensive whistle and the sharp monotony of
the red-eyed vireo. The thrasher is silent in the berry pasture, and the
bobolink in the meadow. The season of jollity is over. Orioles, to be
sure, after a month of silence, again have fits of merry fifing. The
field sparrow and the song sparrow are still in tune, and the meadow
lark whistles, though rarely. Catbirds still practice their feeble
improvisations and mimicries in the thickets along the brooksides as
evening comes on, and of the multitudes of robins a few are certain to
be heard warbling before the day is over. Goldfinches have grown
suddenly numerous, or so it seems, and not infrequently one of them
breaks out in musical canary-like twitterings. On moonlight evenings the
tremulous, haunting cry of the screech-owl comes to your ears, always
from far away, and if you walk through the chestnut grove aforesaid in
the daytime you may chance to catch his faint, vibratory, tree-frog
whistle. For myself, I never enter the grove without glancing into the
dry top of a certain tall tree, to see whether the little rascal is
sitting in his open door. More than half the time he is there, and
always with his eye on me. What an air he has!--like a judge on the
bench! If I were half as wise as he looks, these essays of mine would
never more be dull. For his and all other late summer music let us be
thankful; but it is true, nevertheless, that the year is waning. How
short it has been! Only the other day the concert opened, and already
the performers are uneasy to be gone. They have crowded so much into so
brief a space! The passion of a life-time into the quarter of a year!
They are impatient to be gone, I say; but who knows how many of them
are gone already? Where are the blue golden-winged warblers that sang
daily on the edge of the wood opposite my windows, so that I listened to
them at my work? I have heard nothing of their rough _dsee, dsee_ since
the 21st of June, and in all that time have seen them but once--a single
bird, a youngling of the present year, stumbled upon by accident while
pushing my way through a troublesome thicket on the first day of August.
Who knows,