WINTER BIRDS ABOUT BOSTON. 199 



in evergreen trees, and so near the road that I 

 had no call to commit trespass. Evergreens are 

 their usual resort, — so, at least, I gather from 

 books, — but I have seen them picking up prov- 

 ender from a bare-looking last gear's garden. 

 Natives of the inhospitable North, they have 

 learned by long experience how to adapt them- 

 selves to circumstances. If one resource fails, 

 there is always another to be tried. Let us 

 hope that they even know how to show fight 

 upon occasion. 



The purple finch — a small copy of the pine 

 grosbeak, as the indigo bird is of the blue gros- 

 beak — is a summer rather than a winter bird 

 with us ; yet he sometimes passes the cold sea- 

 son in Eastern Massachusetts, and even in 

 Northern New Hampshire. I have never heard 

 him sing more gloriously than once when the 

 ground was deep under the snow ; a wonder- 

 fully sweet and protracted warble, poured out 

 while the singer circled about in the air with a 

 kind of half-hovering flight. 



As I was walking briskly along a West End 

 street, one cold morning in March, I heard a 

 bird's note close at hand, and, looking down, 

 discovered a pair of these finches in a front 

 yard. The male, in bright plumage, was flit- 

 ting about his mate, calling anxiously, while 

 she, poor thing, sat motionless upon the snow, 



