been made to render them into some semblance of human language. Addison
always insisted that they said, "Dew-lip, Dew-lip; bill it, bill it,
bill it;"--the whole song being an exhortation of the robin to his mate
whose name was _Dew-lip_, to get up and _bill it_ for worms. Halstead
had somewheres got hold of a medical rendering of the song, by a waggish
doctor who declared that the robins were constantly admonishing him in
the line of his profession:--

"Kill 'em, cure 'em; physic, physic."

But the rest of us scouted this partisan interpretation.

The explosive, alarmingly energetic danger cry of, "Piff, piff," which
will so suddenly wake the entire vicinity of the nest, is at times
modified and given quite a different intonation, as if to express
discontent: "Fibb, fibb!" and sometimes even loneliness: "Pheeb,
pheeb!"--very mournful.

During a shower, accompanied by wind in heavy wrenching gusts, in the
night, that summer, a nest containing four young robins fell from a
maple, a few rods down the lane, into the grass beneath. Theodora heard
the outcry of the old robins, blended with the thunder and the roar of
the rain, in the night, and noticing their mournful notes next morning
about the tree, made search and discovered the calamity. Addison and she
gathered up the nestlings and putting them in an old berry box, lined
with grass and cotton batting, tied the improvised nest to a branch of
the maple. For an hour or two the scolding old birds would not go near
the thing, but later in the day we saw them, feeding their young in it,
quite as if nothing had happened to disturb them.

In the rear of the wagon-house there grew a good-sized mountain ash or
round-wood tree which nearly every fall was crowned with the usual great
bright-red clusters of bitter berries. Late in October the robins
always came for those berries, and sometimes a flock of fifty or sixty
would assemble. We often tried to frighten the birds away, for the red
clusters are beautiful in winter, but for a long time we never succeeded
in saving them. The robins would linger about for a week, or more,
rather than leave a single bunch of those berries ungathered. Addison
once placed a stuffed cat-skin in the tree, at which the robins scolded
vociferously for a day or two from the neighboring shrubs and fence; but
they suddenly discovered the deception and got all the remaining berries
in the course of a single forenoon. Addison was boasting a littl