rly the noise by night, is unnatural; nor are the
reflected colors from urban structures normal to the eye. Add to these
the undue tension to which city life, as a whole, braces the living
substance of brain and nerve, and the reason why city populations have
to be so constantly recruited from the country is in some degree
explained. Children even more than older persons need country
surroundings.

Next to the deep novelty of the wide green landscape, came the
bird-songs. It was June. The air seemed to me all a-quiver with
bird-notes, and I was listening to each and every one. Ah, to my
untried, youthful eyes those fresh great hay-fields, whitening with
ox-eyed daisies, reddening with sweet-scented clover and streaked golden
with vivid yellow butter-cups, over which the song-convulsed bobolinks
hovered on arcuate wings!

I had never heard the nesting song of a bobolink before. What a song it
is!--the eager zeal, the exultation in it. The overflowing, rollicking
joy with which it is poured forth, filled me with such gleeful
astonishment, the first time I heard one, and struck such a chord of
sympathetic feeling in my heart and so powerfully, that I recollect
shouting, "ye-ho!" and racing tumultuously after the rapturous singer.

"What does that bird say?" I cried.

Laughing quietly at my fresh curiosity, the Old Squire told me that the
bird was supposed to say,--

"Bob o' Lincoln, take-a-stick-and-give-a-lick, Bob-olink, Kitty-link,
Withy-link, Billy-seeble, see, see, see!"

Addison gave a somewhat different interpretation which has now slipped
my memory; I deemed the Old Squire's version the more reliable one.
While strawberrying in the fields, that summer, I searched three or four
times for the nests which I felt sure were close by, in the grass, for
the little plain gray wife of the noisy singer sat on the weed-tops,
crying,--"Skack! skack!" but I could not find them.

Once, I remember, the following year Theodora and I resolved that we
would find the nest of one bold fellow that kept singing close over our
heads, as we were gathering strawberries in a grassy swale, in the west
field. We set down our dishes and crept over every foot of a tract at
least a quarter of an acre in extent, and went over a part of it two or
three times. At last, we found it, but not till we had crushed both nest
and eggs beneath our crawling knees--a denouement which distressed
Theodora so much that she declared she would never searc