t being able to
pay for it, had given a mortgage, and hadn't managed the farm very well,
had let the interest run behind, they had heard, so there was a prospect
of his losing it.

"I guess he won't have to give it up," said one: "the woman that raised
his wife has got plenty of money, and if he can't make it, she'll pay
for the place and let them live on it. She's helped them several times
already. If he wasn't so lazy and shiftless he might have everything in
good shape."

But a conversation which was going on at the lower end of the table
interested Elvira most of all. It was about birds, including some of
her favorites of the woods and fields which she had noticed a great deal
in her solitary rides that summer. The principal speaker was a young
farmer whom she had never seen before. He seemed to be acquainted with
the names and habits of all the birds which lived in that section,
besides many which merely passed through it on their way northward every
spring and southward every fall.

"I have kept a record of the time of each arrival," he said, "and notes
of rare birds. The bluebird came first, and the humming-bird last. And I
discovered two birds that were new to me. One is a Northern bunting. A
flock stayed one day in our orchard on their way northward to their
summer home, and I succeeded in killing and stuffing a pair. The
feathers of the male were a beautiful pink-red. The other strange bird
seemed to come with the scarlet tanager, and is much like a pee-wee in
shape and size, with feathers of a greenish yellow."

"When do you find time to learn so much about birds?" asked George
Loper, who knew only a few of the more common ones,--blackbirds, crows,
jays, hawks, and robins,--and had no eyes for the variety of feathered
life around him.

"I keep my eyes open as I work and as I go along the road," answered
young Farmer Worth; "then I look up their names and read something about
them in a book on birds which I have. You've no idea how much enjoyment
there is in it. I have quite a collection of birds which I have stuffed,
and more than a hundred different kinds of eggs, besides my cabinet of
mineral specimens. I nailed two ladders together, and climbed thirty
feet above these and got a crow's nest; and this spring we found a
hawk's nest in a high tree. We tied a stout twine to a small stone,
which we threw over the forks of the tree, and with this drew a large
rope over. Then I sat in the noose of the rope,