orests of Labrador.

A curious thing about the flocks we see in winter is that they are
composed almost entirely of females. The male bird is very rare with
us. You can tell him instantly by his brighter color and his
beautiful crimson breast. Sometimes the flocks contain a few young
males, but until the first mating season has tipped their breast
feathers with deep crimson they are almost indistinguishable from
their sober colored companions.

This crimson breast shield, by the way, is the family mark or coat of
arms of the grosbeaks, just as the scarlet crest marks all the
woodpeckers. And if you ask a Micmac, deep in the woods, how the
grosbeak got his shield, he may tell you a story that will interest
you as did the legend of Hiawatha and the woodpecker in your childhood
days.

If the old male, with his proud crimson, be rare with us, his
beautiful song is still more so. Only in the deep forests, by the
lonely rivers of the far north, where no human ear ever hears, does he
greet the sunrise from the top of some lofty spruce. There also he
pours into the ears of his sober little gray wife the sweetest love
song of the birds. It is a flood of soft warbling notes, tinkling like
a brook deep under the ice, tumbling over each other in a quiet
ecstasy of harmony; mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much
softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to whom he sang.
Those who know the music of the rose-breasted grosbeak (not his
robin-like song of spring, but the exquisitely soft warble to his
brooding mate) may multiply its sweetness indefinitely, and so form
an idea of what the pine-grosbeak's song is like.

But sometimes he forgets himself in his winter visit, and sings as
other birds do, just because his world is bright; and then, once in a
lifetime, a New England bird lover hears him, and remembers; and
regrets for the rest of his life that the grosbeak's northern country
life has made him so shy a visitor.

* * * * *

One Christmas morning, a few years ago, the new-fallen snow lay white
and pure over all the woods and fields. It was soft and clinging as it
fell on Christmas eve. Now every old wall and fence was a carved bench
of gleaming white; every post and stub had a soft white robe and a
tall white hat; and every little bush and thicket was a perfect
fairyland of white arches and glistening columns, and dark grottoes
walled about with delicate frostwork of si