e of the
success of his ruse when, at dinner, Ellen quietly bade him go look at
the tree. The robins had already got every berry and gone, leaving the
feline effigy in the bare tree, an object of mirth and ridicule. A
scarecrow made of old clothes, stuffed with hay and crowned by an old
hat, set up in the tree the following year, served no better purpose.
Ellen and Theodora then hung an old tin clothes boiler in the tree, and
arranged a jangling bunch of tin ware inside it, with a long line
running to the kitchen window, where they could conveniently give it a
jerk every few minutes. This device answered well for a day or two, and
it was very amusing to see those robins scatter from the tree, when the
line was pulled. They were some little time making up their minds
concerning it, and would sit on the back fence and rub their beaks on
the posts, at intervals, as if making a great effort to comprehend the
cause of the "manifestations" inside the boiler. No doubt the more
superstitious ones attributed it to "spirits." Skepticism increased,
however, and by the second day one unbelieving red fellow refused to
budge, till the line was jerked twice, and soon after that they wore the
girls out, pulling it, and got the berries as usual. The year after,
Addison saved the berries by stretching one of his cherry-tree nets over
the round-wood tree, in October. It chanced, however, that the tree
failed to produce a crop of berries the next season and died a year or
two later;--a circumstance which Gram hinted, mysteriously, might be a
"dispensation," on account of our persistent efforts to thwart the
robins. It should be taken into account, however, that the mountain-ash
is not long-lived, and that this was already an old tree.

In a large maple, down the lane, a preacher-bird sang every day in June
and until into August, generally loudest and most continuously, from
eleven till two o'clock. On coming to or going from our dinner, we would
often hear him: sometimes he sang in the morning and now and then after
supper. This bird--it is the red-eyed vireo--has an oddly persistent,
pragmatic note, which can hardly be called singing, being more like
declamation and somewhat disconnected and disjoint, as if the "preacher"
were laying down certain truths and facts and seeking by constant
iteration to impress them upon dullards. Betwixt every one of these
short sentences, there is a little pause, as if the preacher were
waiting for the trut