96 EVERYDAY BIRDS 
he reaches the furthermost coast of Labrador or 
the banks of the Saskatchewan. The prospectus 
of which I spoke, and of which every reader 
ought to have a copy, tells, in a general way, 
whither each company is bound, but the members 
of the same company often scatter themselves 
over several degrees of latitude. 
Some of the companies move compactly, and 
are only two or three days, more or less, in pass- 
ing a given point. You must be in the woods, 
for example, on the 12th or 13th of May, or you 
will miss them altogether. Others straggle along 
fora whole month. You begin to think, perhaps, 
that they mean to stay with you all summer, but 
some morning you wake up to the fact that the 
last one has gone. 
It is curious how few people see this army of 
travelers. They pass by thousands and hundreds 
of thousands. More than a hundred different 
companies go through every town in Massa- 
chusetts between March 1 and June 1. They 
dress gayly —not a few of them seem to have 
borrowed Joseph’s coat — and are full of music, 
yet somehow their advent excites little remark. 
Perhaps it is because, for the most part, they flit 
from bush to bush and from tree to tree, here 
one and there one. If some year they should 
form in line, and move in close order along the 
