h to strike home to his hearers; but if the bird is
watched, he will be seen to be picking and hopping about on the branch
which serves him as a pulpit, snapping up a bug or a seed here and
there. Yet his discourse goes steadily on, by the half hour, or hour,
sometimes with a rising inflection, as after a question, sometimes the
falling, as having given an irrefutable answer, himself. Once the idea
that the bird is preaching has entered a listener's mind, he can never
shake it off.

"My hearers--where are you?--You know it--you see it.--Do you hear
me?--Do you believe it?" And so on, upon the same insistent and at
length tiresome strain.

"Oh, I do wish that preacher bird would stop," Ellen would exclaim at
times. "He has 'preached' steadily all the forenoon!"

His place for singing was always about half way from the ground to the
top of the maple, and he rarely came out in sight. The female was
probably sitting on her nest, hard by. They are trim little olive-tinted
birds and often rear two broods, I think, for they remain north till
autumn.

Once while Elder Witham was with us, in haying time, Ellen exclaimed,
inadvertently, as we were going in to sit down at table one day,
"There's that preacher bird again!"

The Elder looked at her a moment and said slowly, "'Preacher-bird,
preacher-bird,' what kind of a bird is that, young lady?"

Greatly abashed at her lapse, Ellen hardly knew how to best explain it,
but Addison came to her rescue. "There are two of those vireos," he
remarked in a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact tone. "One of them, the
warbling vireo, they call the 'brigadier' on account of its peculiar
note, and the other or red-eyed vireo, the 'preacher,' from its earnest
manner of utterance. I don't know," Addison continued, with candid
frankness, "that the names are very well chosen, but we have got in the
habit of calling them that way."

The Elder listened to this, observing Addison closely, then appeared
thoughtful for a moment and said, impressively, "Well, all God's
creatures preach, if only we have ears to hear them." Ellen drew a long
breath of relief, and after dinner, out on the wood-shed walk, she took
Addison by the button and said, "You're a treasure, Ad; ask me for a
cooky any time after this."

The brigadier, or warbling vireo, frequently sits on the tops of trees,
when singing; while the preacher takes his stand midway from the ground
upwards; the brigadier, too, more frequently join