eved to breed sparingly in Northern New England.

A BIRD-LOVER'S APRIL

There shall be
Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky-children.

KEATS.

Everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed
rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which
they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and
yet these is a silent joy at their arrival.

COLERIDGE.

A BIRD-LOVER'S APRIL.

It began on the 29th of March; in the afternoon of which day, despite
the authority of the almanac and the banter of my acquaintances (March
was March to them, and it was nothing more), I shook off the city's dust
from my feet, and went into summer quarters. The roads were
comparatively dry; the snow was entirely gone, except a patch or two in
the shadow of thick pines under the northerly side of a hill; and all
tokens seemed to promise an early spring. So much I learned before the
hastening twilight cut short my first brief turn out-of-doors. In the
morning would be time enough to discover what birds had already reported
themselves at my station.

Unknown to me, however, our national weather bureau had announced a
snow-storm, and in the morning I drew aside the curtains to look out
upon a world all in white, with a cold, high wind blowing and snow
falling fast. "The worst Sunday of the winter," the natives said. The
"summer boarder" went to church, of course. To have done otherwise might
have been taken for a confession of weakness; as if inclemency of this
sort were more than he had bargained for. The villagers, lacking any
such spur to right conduct, for the most part stayed at home; feeling it
not unpleasant, I dare say, some of them, to have a natural inclination
providentially confirmed, even at the cost of an hour's exercise with
the shovel. The bravest parishioner of all, and the sweetest
singer,--the song sparrow by name,--was not in the meeting-house, but by
the roadside. What if the wind did blow, and the mercury stand at
fifteen or twenty degrees below the freezing point? In cold as in heat
"the mind is its own place."

Three days after this came a second storm, one of the heaviest
snow-falls of the year. The robins were reduced to picking up seeds in