estimated,
and he should never be destroyed.

The conduct of different birds is not alike upon their arrival from the
South at their summer nesting haunts in our more northern latitudes;
some heralding their advent with jubilant song as if in greeting to the
familiar scenes, while others are silent and wary. The first I knew of
the Baltimore and orchard orioles last spring, they were singing
blithely in the trees about the house; but the brown thrashers flitted
about slyly and silently for a few days, apparently to make sure that
the coast was clear of danger; having done which, they burst into their
dithyrambs with a will. Out in the woodland the gorgeous scarlet
tanager announced his arrival one morning with a lively sonnet, which
was heard long before the singer was seen; whereas his cousin, the
summer tanager, uttered only his quaint alarm-call, "Chip-burn,
chip-burn," and was excessively shy, dashing wildly away as I
approached, unwilling to vouchsafe a wisp of song. Once he even
pounced angrily upon his black-winged relative and drove him to the
other side of the hollow, precisely as if he meant to say, "Your
singing is out of place, sir, and dangerous, too! Don't you know that
the man prowling about yonder will shoot little birds who betray their
presence by singing?"

[Illustration: Baltimore Oriole]

One of our most lavish singers all summer long is the indigo bunting;
yet when he first came back from the South he was very shy, and his
voice seemed to be out of tune, so that, even when he tried to sing,
which was seldom, his effort sounded like the creaking of a rusty
door-hinge. Afterwards, however, when he got the cobwebs out of his
larynx, he made up for all his previous silence. Quite different is
the habit of the towhee, which announces his presence by his loud,
explosive trill--all too brief--or his complaining "chewing."

Sometimes the rambler and bird gazer meets with other than avian
"specimens" in his excursions. One evening I was loitering in a
distant hollow, ogling with my field glass several lark sparrows that
were flitting about on the ground in an adjacent patch of some kind.
The birds were singing as only these beautiful sparrows can, and the
quiet of the evening lent an idyllic charm to their rich and varied
chansons. On the other side of a small stream stood a shanty, in the
door of which sat an old negro woman. In looking at the birds, I
sometimes turned the glass toward the s