e that I stayed indoors,--the mercury only two or three
degrees above zero, and a strong wind blowing. Such weather would drive
the birds under shelter. The next forenoon, therefore, I betook myself
to a hill covered thickly with pines and cedars. Here I soon ran upon
several robins, feeding upon the savin berries, and in a moment more was
surprised by a _tseep_ so loud and emphatic that I thought at once of a
fox sparrow. Then I looked for a song sparrow,--badly startled,
perhaps,--but found to my delight a white-throat. He was on the ground,
but at my approach flew into a cedar. Here he drew in his head and sat
perfectly still, the picture of discouragement. I could not blame him,
but was glad, an hour later, to find him again on the ground, picking up
his dinner. I leveled my glass at him and whistled his Peabody song (the
simplest of all bird songs to imitate), but he moved not a feather.
Apparently he had never heard it before! He was still there in the
afternoon, and I had hopes of his remaining through the winter; but I
never could find him afterwards. Ten days prior to this I had gone to
Longwood on a special hunt for this same sparrow, remembering a certain
peculiarly cozy hollow where, six or eight years before, a little
company of song sparrows and white-throats had passed a rather severe
winter. The song sparrows were there again, as I had expected, but no
white-throats. The song sparrows, by the way, treated me shabbily this
season. A year ago several of them took up their quarters in a roadside
garden patch, where I could look in upon them almost daily. This year
there were none to be discovered anywhere in this neighborhood. They
figure in my December list on four days only, and were found in four
different towns,--Brookline (Longwood), Marblehead, Nahant, and
Cohasset. Like some others of our land birds (notably the golden-winged
woodpecker and the meadow lark), they seem to have learned that winter
loses a little of its rigor along the sea-board.

Three kinds of land birds were met with at Nahant Beach, and nowhere
else: the Ipswich sparrow,--on the 3d and 26th,--the snow bunting, and
the horned lark. Of the last two species, both of them rather common in
November, I saw but one individual each. They were feeding side by
side, and, after a short separation,--under the fright into which my
sudden appearance put them,--one called to the other, and they flew off
in company towards Lynn. It was a pleasing di