rent class of birds. In a
land of the beech and sugar maple I do not find the same songsters
that I know where thrive the oak, chestnut, and laurel. In going from
a district of the Old Red Sandstone to where I walk upon the old
Plutonic Rock, not fifty miles distant, I miss in the woods, the
veery, the hermit thrush, the chestnut-sided warbler, the blue-backed
warbler, the green-backed warbler, the black and yellow warbler, and
many others, and find in their stead the wood thrush, the chewink, the
redstart, the yellow-throat, the yellow-breasted flycatcher, the
white-eyed flycatcher, the quail, and the turtle dove.

In my neighborhood here in the Highlands the distribution is very
marked. South of the village I invariably find one species of birds,
north of it another. In only one locality, full of azalea and
swamp-huckleberry, I am always sure of finding the hooded warbler. In
a dense undergrowth of spice-bush, witch-hazel, and alder, I meet the
worm-eating warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with heath and
fern, with here and there a chestnut and an oak, I go to hear in July
the wood sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am sure
to find the water-thrush.

Only one locality within my range seems to possess attractions for all
comers. Here one may study almost the entire ornithology of the State.
It is a rocky piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now fast
relapsing into the wildness and freedom of nature, and marked by those
half-cultivated, half-wild features which birds and boys love. It is
bounded on two sides by the village and highway, crossed at various
points by carriage-roads, and threaded in all directions by paths and
byways, along which soldiers, laborers, and truant school-boys are
passing at all hours of the day. It is so far escaping from the axe
and the bush-hook as to have opened communication with the forest and
mountain beyond by straggling lines of cedar, laurel, and blackberry.
The ground is mainly occupied with cedar and chestnut, with an
undergrowth, in many place, of heath and bramble. The chief feature,
however, is a dense growth in the centre, consisting of dogwood,
water-beech, swamp-ash, alder, spice-bush, hazel, etc., with a network
of smilax and frost-grape. A little zigzag stream, the draining of a
swam beyond, which passes through this tanglewood, accounts for many
of its features and productions, if not for its entire existence.
Birds that are not attracted by the hea