family group,
a pair with their two full-grown but still babyish young. Approaching
cautiously, I usually found the parents on the ground busily hunting
insects, and the youngsters following closely, ready to receive every
morsel discovered. They were, however, very well bred, with none of the
vulgar manners of those who scream and shout and demand their rations.
Later in the day I often found the thrasher singing, a little beyond the
alders, on the breezy heights of Raspberry Hill. His chosen place was an
almost leafless birch-tree, a favorite perch with all the birds of the
pasture, and there he sang for hours.

"'Twas a song that rippled and reveled and ran
Ever back to the note whence it began,
Rising and falling, and never did stay,
Like a fountain that feeds on itself all day."

Sometimes the singing was interrupted, for those canny Young Americans
knew their father's song, and though he had doubtless stolen away and
left them foraging on the grass by the path, they heard his voice and
came after. While he was pouring out his soul in ecstasy, and I was
listening with equal joy, those youngsters came by easy stages nearer
and nearer, till one after the other alighted on the lower part of the
birch, and, hopping upward from branch to branch, suddenly presented
themselves before him, begging in pretty baby fashion for something to
eat. The singer, embarrassed by their demands, would sometimes dive into
the nearest bushes, followed instantly by the persistent beggars, and in
a moment fly off, the infants still in his wake. But he always managed
in some way to elude them. Perhaps he fed them or conducted them back to
their mother, for in a few minutes he appeared again on the birch and
resumed his music.

[Sidenote: _OUT ALONE._]

On one occasion I met one of these spruce young thrushes, evidently out
on his travels alone for the first time. He was in a state of great
excitement,--jerked himself about, "huffed" at me, then flew with some
difficulty into a tree, where he stood and watched me in a charmingly
naive and childlike manner, utterly forgetting that part of his
education which bade him beware of a human being.

After passing the home of the thrashers, on my usual morning walk toward
the north, my next temptation to linger came from a fern-lined path to
the spring, abode of other Young Americans. The path itself was
extremely seductive, narrow, zigzagging through a small forest of the
greenest and