28 EVERYDAY BIRDS 
It is really a: wonderful performance. There 
are very few kinds of birds that do anything like 
it. Of itself it is enough to make the song spar- 
row famous, and it is well worth any one’s while 
to hear it and see it done. Nobody can see it 
without believing that birds have a true appre- 
ciation of music. They are better off than some 
human beings, at all events. They know one 
tune from another. 
A lady correspondent was good enough to 
send me, not long ago, a pleasing account of the 
doings of a pair of song sparrows, which, as she 
says, came to her for six seasons. 
“One year,” she writes, “they happened to 
build where I could watch them from the win- 
dow, and they did a very curious thing. They 
fed the little birds with all sorts of worms of dif- 
ferent colors until they were ready to leave the 
nest; then the male brought a pure white moth 
and held it near the nest, which was in some 
stems of a rosebush a few inches from the 
ground, on a level with the lower rail of a picket 
fence. 
“One of the little birds came out of the nest 
at once and followed its parent, who went side- 
wise, always holding the dazzling white morsel 
just out of the youngster’s reach. In this man- 
ner they crossed the lane, climbed the inclined 
