--with a hopeful, "Well, now, they'll soon be here
again." During the summer, according to her, he was always an interested
spectator of their gyrations in the air, and when evening would come was
never so happy as when standing and staring at them gathering from all
directions to their roosts in the trees or the birdhouses. Similarly,
when the fall approached and they would begin their long flight
Southward, he would sometimes stand and scan the sky and trees in vain
for a final glimpse of his feathered friends, and when in the gathering
darkness they were no longer to be seen would turn away toward the
house, saying sadly to his daughter:

"Well, Dollie, the blackbirds are all gone. I am sorry. I like to see
them, and I am always sorry to lose them, and sorry to know that winter
is coming."

"Usually about the 25th or 26th of December," his daughter once
quaintly added to me, "he would note that the days were beginning to get
longer, and cheer up, as spring was certain to follow soon and bring
them all back again."

One of the most interesting of his bird friendships was that which
existed between him and a pair of crows he and his sons had raised,
"Jim" and "Zip" by name. These crows came to know him well, and were
finally so humanly attached to him that, according to his family, they
would often fly two or three miles out of town to meet him and would
then accompany him, lighting on fences and trees by the way, and cawing
to him as he drove along! Both of them were great thieves, and would
steal anything from a bit of thread up to a sewing machine, if they
could have carried it. They were always walking about the house,
cheerfully looking for what they might devour, and on one occasion
carried off a set of spoons, which they hid about the eaves of the
house. On another occasion they stole a half dozen tin-handled pocket
knives, which the doctor had bought for the children and which the crows
seemed to like for the brightness of the metal. They were recovered once
by the children, stolen again by the crows, recovered once more, and so
on, until at last it was a question as to which were the rightful
owners.

The doctor was sitting in front of a store one day in the business-heart
of town, where also he liked to linger in fair weather, when suddenly he
saw one of his crows flying high overhead and bearing something in its
beak, which it dropped into the road scarcely a hundred feet away.
Interested to see what it