er as in summer, unquenchable by the severest frost. With the help
of the chickadees they made a delightful stir in the solemn winter
days, and when we were out chopping we never ceased to wonder how
their slender naked toes could be kept warm when our own were so
painfully frosted though clad in thick socks and boots. And we
wondered and admired the more when we thought of the little midgets
sleeping in knot-holes when the temperature was far below zero,
sometimes thirty-five degrees below, and in the morning, after a
minute breakfast of a few frozen insects and hoarfrost crystals,
playing and chatting in cheery tones as if food, weather, and
everything was according to their own warm hearts. Our Yankee told us
that the name of this darling was Devil-downhead.

Their big neighbors the owls also made good winter music, singing out
loud in wild, gallant strains bespeaking brave comfort, let the frost
bite as it might. The solemn hooting of the species with the widest
throat seemed to us the very wildest of all the winter sounds.

Prairie chickens came strolling in family flocks about the shanty,
picking seeds and grasshoppers like domestic fowls, and they became
still more abundant as wheat-and corn-fields were multiplied, but also
wilder, of course, when every shotgun in the country was aimed at
them. The booming of the males during the mating-season was one of the
loudest and strangest of the early spring sounds, being easily heard
on calm mornings at a distance of a half or three fourths of a mile.
As soon as the snow was off the ground, they assembled in flocks of a
dozen or two on an open spot, usually on the side of a ploughed field,
ruffled up their feathers, inflated the curious colored sacks on the
sides of their necks, and strutted about with queer gestures something
like turkey gobblers, uttering strange loud, rounded, drumming
calls,--_boom! boom! boom!_ interrupted by choking sounds. My brother
Daniel caught one while she was sitting on her nest in our corn-field.
The young are just like domestic chicks, run with the mother as soon
as hatched, and stay with her until autumn, feeding on the ground,
never taking wing unless disturbed. In winter, when full-grown, they
assemble in large flocks, fly about sundown to selected
roosting-places on tall trees, and to feeding-places in the
morning,--unhusked corn-fields, if any are to be found in the
neighborhood, or thickets of dwarf birch and willows, the buds of
w