RUBY-CROWNED KINGLET 355 



man, and are too bnsy about their own affairs to 

 be curious about their neighbors. 



The song of the Ruby is one of the most re- 

 markable of bird songs, being comparable with 

 that of the Winter Wren. My first experience 

 with it was when Mr. Burroughs took out a party 

 of girls at Smith College, and pointed out the 

 diminutive songster in the pines. Several years 

 later, when the Ruby was in Central Park on its 

 way north, Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller came over 

 from Brooklyn expressly to hear it, and we spent 

 a morning in the Ramble listening to it, marvel- 

 ing at the volume and the ringing quality of the 

 notes. The following October I heard the King- 

 let again, but this time the song was a low, sweet, 

 liquid warble, smooth and rounded, but without 

 the force or ecstacy of spring. It seemed a fitting 

 Indian Summer meditation, though without the 

 languor of the season, being full of the freshness 

 of the breeze that tempers the heat of the autumn 

 sun. 



