DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS. 53 
peculiarly cozy hollow where, six or eight 
years before, a little company of song spar- 
rows and white-throats had passed a rather 
severe winter. The song sparrows were 
there again, as I had expected, but no white- 
throats. The song sparrows, by the way, 
treated me shabbily this season. A year 
ago several of them took up their quarters 
ina roadside garden patch, where I could 
look in upon them almost daily. This year 
there were none to be discovered anywhere 
in this neighborhood. They figure in my 
December list on four days only, and were 
found in four different towns, — Brookline 
(Longwood), Marblehead, Nahant, and Co- 
hasset. Like some others of our land birds 
(notably the golden-winged woodpecker and 
the meadow lark), they seem to have learned 
that winter loses a little of its rigor along 
the sea-board. 
Three kinds of land birds were met with 
at Nahant Beach, and nowhere else: the 
Ipswich sparrow, —on the 3d and 26th, — 
the snow bunting, and the horned lark. Of 
the last two species, both of them rather 
common in November, I saw but one in- 
dividual each. They were feeding side by 
