ir neighbors and with one
another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable
emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and
affection. The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family,
but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is
an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest
display of pluck in his antagonist. I have seen him turn tail to a
swallow, and have known the little pewee in question to whip him
beautifully. From the great-crested to the little green flycatcher,
their ways and general habits are the same. Slow in flying from
point to point, they yet have a wonderful quickness, and snap up the
fleetest insects with little apparent effort. There is a constant
play of quick, nervous movements underneath their outer show of
calmness and stolidity. They do not scour the limbs and trees like
the warblers, but, perched upon the middle branches, wait, like true
hunters, for the game to come along. There is often a very audible
snap of the beak as they seize their prey.

The wood pewee, the prevailing species in this locality, arrests
your attention by his sweet, pathetic cry. There is room for it also
in the deep woods, as well as for the more prolonged and elevated
strains.

Its relative, the phoebe-bird, builds an exquisite nest of moss on
the side of some shelving cliff or overhanging rock. The other day,
passing by a ledge near the top of a mountain in a singularly
desolate locality, my eye rested upon one of these structures,
looking precisely as if it grew there, so in keeping was it with the
mossy character of the rock, and I have had a growing affection for
the bird ever since. The rock seemed to love the nest and to claim
it as its own. I said, what a lesson in architecture is here! Here
is a house that was built, but with such loving care and such
beautiful adaptation of the means to the end, that it looks like a
product of nature. The same wise economy is noticeable in the nests
of all birds. No bird could paint its house white or red, or add
aught for show.

At one point in the grayest, most shaggy part of the woods, I come
suddenly upon a brood of screech owls, full grown, sitting together
upon a dry, moss-draped limb, but a few feet from the ground. I
pause within four or five yards of them and am looking about me,
when my eye lights upon these gray, motionless figures. They sit
perfectly upright, some with their backs a