EDITOE'S PREFACE. 



THIS collection of New England bird-songs was begun 

 when the author was in his sixty-seventh year, and 

 left unfinished when, the tenth of May, 1890, he passed 

 suddenly away, being two years beyond his threescore 

 and ten. It is a record of the pastime of an old lover of 

 the birds, of a musician who counted it among his chief 

 joys that he had lived thirty summers in a bird-haunted 

 grove, — of one to whom the voices of the wood and field 

 were as familiar as those of his own family. The inten- 

 tion was to write a book for the young people of New 

 England, many of whom he had taught the rudiments of 

 vocal music. The volume was to be made up of bird- 

 songs and observations on the domestic animals, with 

 special reference to their several forms of utterance. Some- 

 thing was also to be said of the music of inanimate things. 

 The thought came too late ; and it remains for the present 

 writer — not unacquainted with his father's work and 

 wishes — to gather together such fragments as were to 

 be found. 



Brief, imperfect as the record is, it may yet have value 

 if, written without apprenticeship in the endeavors of exact 

 knowledge, it accord here and there with the conclusions 



