sick for the wideness and quiet of the country, for the soughing of
the pines, the distant bang of a barn door, the night cry of guineas from
some neighboring farm, when, in the hurry and din, I caught the cry of
bird voices, and looking up, found that I had stumbled upon a bird
roost--at the very heart of the city! I was in front of King's Chapel
Burial Ground, whose half-dozen leafless trees were alive with noisy
sparrows.

The crowd swept on. I halted behind a waste-barrel by the iron fence and
forgot the soughing pines and clacking guineas.

Bird roosts of this size are no common find. I remember a huge fireplace
chimney that stood near my home, into which a cloud of swallows used to
swarm for a few nights preceding the fall migration; I lived some years
close to the pines at the head of Cubby Hollow, where great flocks of
crows slept nightly throughout the winter; but these, besides now and
again a temporary resting-place, a mere caravansary along the route of the
migrants, were all I had happened upon. Here was another, bordering a city
street, overhanging the street, with a blazing electric light to get into
bed by!

Protected by the barrel from the jostle on the sidewalk, I waited by the
ancient graveyard until the electric lights grew bright, until every
fussing sparrow was quiet, until I could see only little gray balls and
blurs in the trees through the misty drizzle that came down with the
night. Then I turned toward my own snug roost, five flights up, next the
roof, and just a block away, as the sparrows fly, from this roost of
theirs. I was glad to have them so near me.

The windows of my roost look out over roofs of slate, painted tin, and
tarry pebbles, into a chimney-fenced plot of sky. Occasionally, during the
winter, a herring-gull from the harbor swims into this bit of smoky blue;
frequently a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past; and in the summer
dusk, after the swallows quit it, a city-haunting night-hawk climbs out of
the forest of chimney-pots, up, up above the smoke for his booming
roofward swoop. But winter and summer, save along through June, the
sparrows, as evening falls, cut across the sky field on their way to the
roost in the old burial-ground. There go two, there twoscore in a
whirling, scudding flurry, like a swift-blown bunch of autumn leaves. For
more than an hour they keep passing--till the dusk turns to darkness, till
all are tucked away in bed.

One would scarcely recognize