THE MALE RUBY-THROAT. 145 
talking, the scene was reénacted. The 
stranger had returned, and the two birds 
were, shooting hither and thither through the 
trees, the widow squeaking and spreading 
her tail at a prodigious rate. The new-comer 
did not alight Gt could n’t), and there was 
no determining its sex. It may have been 
the recreant husband and father, unable 
longer to deny himself a look at his bairns, 
—who knows? Or it may have been some 
bachelor or widower who had come a-woo- 
ing. One thing is certain, — husband, 
lcver, or inquisitive stranger, he had no 
ercouragement to come again. 
As if to heighten the dramatic interest of 
our studies (I come now to the promised 
mystery), we had already had the singular 
good fortune to find a male humming-bird 
who seemed to be stationed permanently in 
a tall ash-tree, standing by itself in a recent 
clearing, at a distance of a mile or more 
from our widow’s orchard. Day after day, 
for at least a fortnight (from the 2d to the 
15th of July), he remained there. One or 
both of us went almost daily to call upon 
him, and, as far as we could make out, he 
seldom absented himself from his post for 
