d done it all his life, to the next
tree, where he began at once to call for refreshment, after his
exertion.

Disappointed, we dropped our eyes, whisked away our insect tormentors,
gathered up our properties, and passed on our way.

This was the farthest point of our wanderings. The way back was through
a narrow path beside the oven-bird's pretty domed nest, then between the
tangle of wild-berry bushes and saplings, where a cuckoo had set up
housekeeping, and where veeries and warblers had successfully hidden
their nests, tantalizing us with calls and songs from morning till
night; from thence through the garden, past the kitchen door, home.

XIV.

A BOBOLINK RHAPSODY.

Can anything be more lovely than a meadow in June, its tall grass
overtopped by daisies, whose open faces,

"Candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free,
Publish themselves to the sky"?

One such I knew, despised of men as a meadow, no doubt, but glorious to
the eye with its unbroken stretch of white bowing before the summer
breeze like the waves of the sea, and charming as well to pewee and
kingbird who hovered over it, ever and anon diving and bringing up food
for the nestlings. When, to a meadow not so completely abandoned to
daisies, where buttercups and red clover flourish among the grass, is
added the music of the meadow's poet, the bobolink, surely nothing is
lacking to its perfection.

Passing such a field one evening, I noted the babble of bobolinks, too
far off to hear well, and the next day I set out down another path which
passed through the meadow, to cultivate the acquaintance of the birds.
It was a warm summer morning, near the middle of June, and when I
reached the spot not a bobolink was in sight; but I sought a convenient
bank under an old apple-tree, made myself as inconspicuous as possible,
and waited. With these birds, however, as I soon found out, my
precautions were unnecessary. They are not chary of their music; on the
contrary, they appear to sing directly to a spectator, and they are too
confident of the security of the nest to be disturbed about that. In a
moment a black head with its buff cap appeared at the top of a grass
stem, and instantly the black body, with its grotesque white decoration,
followed. The bird flew half a dozen feet, singing as he went, as if the
movement of the wings set the music going, alighted a little nearer,
sang again, and finally, concluding that here was something t