MARCH 335 
“<The Phoebe,’ said another, who was the owner of 
a pretty home, where many rambling sheds broke the 
way from cow-barn to pasture. 
“<The Whip-poor-will, but that does not come until 
late in the month,’ answered a third, a dweller in a remote 
colony of artists in a picturesque spot of cleared wood- 
land, where the ground dropped quickly to a stream. 
“*No, the Woodcock,’ said her nearest neighbour, 
a man whose cottage was upon the upper edge of these 
same woods, where they were margined by moist meadows 
and soft bottom-lands, — a man who spent much time 
out-of-doors at dawn and twilight studying sky effects. 
“And I think it’s Redwinged Blackbirds,’ cried the 
ten-year-old son of the latter; ‘for when I go out up 
back of the trout brook by the little path along the 
alders near the squashy place where the cat-tails grow 
in summer, you’ve just got to hear them. You can’t 
listen to them as you do to real singing-birds, for they 
make too much noise, and when you listen for a bird it’s 
got to be still, at least in the beginning. Sometimes 
they go it all together down in the bushes out of sight, 
then a few will walk out up to the dry Meadowlark’s 
field with Cowbirds, or maybe it’s their wives, and then 
one or two will lift up and shoot over the marsh back 
again, calling out just like juicy sky-rockets. Ah, 
they’re in it before the leaves come out to hide them 
even the least bit.’ And, in spite of difference of view- 
point, the group finally acknowledged that the boy was 
right. 
“Tn point of colouring, the Redwing is faultlessly plumed, 
— glossy black with epaulets of scarlet edged with gold, 
