THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 195 



foot, went scurrying in shortlegged rippling bulk across the fields or stood 

 stock still and bolt upright, "frozen" at the mouth of their burrow, the living 

 counterpart of a neighbouring stump ; acres of goldenrod and asters rioted 

 beside the path ; goldenrod of the most beautiful curving-^lumes in place of 

 the stifif homely spikes of the British species ; asters of every size and shade, 

 from white and pale lilac to the rich violet and blue of the Michaelmas Daisy; 

 butterflies that fairly made one's mouth water. Swallow Tails and Fritillaries 

 (Silver Spots), Camberwell Beauties (Mourning Cloaks), Tortoiseshells and 

 Painted Ladies, fluttered and sailed and flew, a bevy of beauty ; and mingling with 

 them strangers of unmistakably royal blood (to judge from their robes). Em- 

 perors and Viceroys worthy of a front page in Burke's Peerage ; and then 

 the birds! In place of a single Green Woodpecker — rare ana local — I saw 

 four or five kinds, all painted as gay as the Tropics, the Flicker, the Red Head, 

 the Downy, the Hairy, and these, mind you, for all their gorgeous plumage, as 

 common as sparrows, or poppies in a cornfield. To cap it all, my ears were 

 filled from every side in the woods with myriads of strange sounds, tapping, 

 creaking, chirping voices, call-notes and songs, as mysterious as Echo, and all 

 clamoring for me to join their game of "I spy" and track them to their secret 

 lair; the very heavens were full of sound, showers of soft twittering notes 

 and sweet music fell about me in the open ; Puck in the woods and Ariel in 

 the sky, what a royal hide-and-seek they had with me that Fall! 



As we were wxre returning from Rosedale on one of these early trips, 

 I called my companion's attention to the barking of a foxterrier in the dis- 

 tance; after locating the sound, he stared at me incredulously for a moment 

 and then remarked scathingly : "A nice one you are in the country, and not 

 know a crow when you hear it ! " And a crow it proved to be, but how 

 different, with its short, sharp, staccato challenge, of ''ca, ca," from the English 

 rook and its lazy drawl of "ciia, ciia!" 



Two other birds I met that Fall for the first time in my life, the lovely 

 Bluebird (a close kinsman of the English Redbreast) and the American Robin. 

 This last I had looked eagerly forward to seeing for over a year; ever since 

 the day when I had joined in the laugh that went round my uncle's dinner- 

 table one Christmas at the expense of a cousin newly home from British 

 Columbia. He had been regaling us with travellers' tales of the strange land 

 beyond the seas, and we had all been devouring them with relish and perhaps 

 a pinch of salt; till he came to this outrageous whopper, no more to be swal- 

 lowed than Gulliver's reported linnets from Brobdingnag as big as swans : "In 

 Canada," remarked my cousin wiii some pride, "our robins are as large as 

 blackbirds." "Yes," countered my uncle drily, "and how large are your tur- 

 keys, my boy?" It was only when I became a resident of Ontario that I discov- 

 ered the robins were a red-breasted thrush ; and in the Spring it soon grew to be 

 an exquisite pleasure to note the bird's song, so characteristic of the thrushes, 

 with its tell-tale bars "sung twice over," as Aristophanes observed more than 

 twenty-three centuries ago and Robert Browning somewhat later ; — and if you 

 had no ears to hear, behold ! the clumpy fledglings, with the speckled breasts 

 they bore, and the way they had with the garden worms, the quick little run 

 over the lawn and the head cocked on one side to listen, thrushes every inch 



