e seems beastly
altogether, he appears suddenly with greeting cheery as the sunshine.
"_Tsic a de-e-e-e?_ Don't you remember yesterday? It rains, to be
sure, but the insects are plenty, and to-morrow the sun will shine."
His cheerfulness is contagious. Your thoughts are better than before
he came.

Really, he is a wonderful little fellow; there is no end to the good
he does. Again and again I have seen a man grow better tempered or
more cheerful, without knowing why he did so, just because Chickadee
stopped a moment to be cheery and sociable. I remember once when a
party of four made camp after a driving rain-storm. Everybody was wet;
everything soaking. The lazy man had upset a canoe, and all the dry
clothes and blankets had just been fished out of the river. Now the
lazy man stood before the fire, looking after his own comfort. The
other three worked like beavers, making camp. They were in ill humor,
cold, wet, hungry, irritated. They said nothing.

A flock of chickadees came down with sunny greetings, fearless,
trustful, never obtrusive. They looked innocently into human faces and
pretended that they did not see the irritation there. "_Tsic a dee_. I
wish I could help. Perhaps I can. _Tic a dee-e-e?_"--with that gentle,
sweetly insinuating up slide at the end. Somebody spoke, for the first
time in half an hour, and it wasn't a growl. Presently somebody
whistled--a wee little whistle; but the tide had turned. Then somebody
laughed. "'Pon my word," he said, hanging up his wet clothes, "I
believe those chickadees make me feel good-natured. Seem kind of
cheery, you know, and the crowd needed it."

And Chickadee, picking up his cracker crumbs, did not act at all as if
he had done most to make camp comfortable.

There is another way in which he helps, a more material way. Millions
of destructive insects live and multiply in the buds and tender bark
of trees. Other birds never see them, but Chickadee and his relations
leave never a twig unexplored. His bright eyes find the tiny eggs
hidden under the buds; his keen ears hear the larvae feeding under the
bark, and a blow of his little bill uncovers them in their
mischief-making. His services of this kind are enormous, though rarely
acknowledged.

Chickadee's nest is always neat and comfortable and interesting, just
like himself. It is a rare treat to find it. He selects an old
knot-hole, generally on the sheltered side of a dry limb, and digs out
the rotten wood, makin