ing-bird feels something wrong at the
quill end of her feathers.

II

Mrs. Walters this morning with more news touching our incoming
neighbors. Whenever I have faced towards this aggregation of unwelcome
individuals, I have beheld it moving towards me as a thick gray
mist, shutting out nature beyond. Perhaps they are approaching
this part of the earth like comet that carries its tail before it,
and I am already enveloped in a disturbing, befogging nebulosity.

There is still no getting the truth, but it appears that they are
a family of consequence in their way--which, of course, may be
a very poor way. Mrs. Margaret Cobb, mother, lately bereaved of
her husband, Joseph Cobb, who fell among the Kentucky boys at the
battle of Buena Vista. A son, Joseph Cobb, now cadet at West Point,
with a desire to die like his father, but destined to die--who
knows?--in a war that may break out in this country about the
negroes.

While not reconciled, I am resigned. The young man when at home
may wish to practise the deadly vocation of an American soldier of
the period over the garden fence at my birds, in which case he and
I could readily fight a duel, and help maintain an honored custom
of the commonwealth. The older daughter will sooner or later turn
loose on my heels one of her pack of blue dogs. If this should
befall me in the spring, and I survive the dog, I could retort
with a dish of strawberries and a copy of "Lalla Rookh"; if in the
fall, with a basket of grapes and Thomson's "Seasons," after which
there would be no further exchange of hostilities. The younger
daughter, being a school-girl, will occasionally have to be subdued
with green apples and salt. The mother could easily give trouble;
or she might be one of those few women to know whom is to know the
best that there is in all this faulty world.

The middle of February. The depths of winter reached. Thoughtful,
thoughtless words--the depths of winter. Everything gone inward
and downward from surface and summit, Nature at low tide. In its
time will come the height of summer, when the tides of life rise
to the tree-tops, or be dashed as silvery insect spray all but to
the clouds. So bleak a season touches my concern for birds, which
never seem quite at home in this world; and the winter has been
most lean and hungry for them. Many snows have fallen--snows that
are as raw cotton spread over their breakfast-table, and cutting
off connection betwe