48 Birds of Lakeside and Prairie 



Britishers without notice. A farm-hand told me that the 

 sparrows had been about the place for three years. He said 

 that the bluebirds disappeared the year that the foreigners 

 arrived. 



The recollection of that southern Indiana farm-house din- 

 ner is with me yet. We ate in a long, narrow room, which 

 had at one end a huge, old-fashioned fireplace with twelve 

 great cord-wood sticks crackling and blazing away in its 

 ample interior. Although the sun was warm, there was a chill 

 in the air that made the fire grateful. I had not seen the 

 equal of that fireplace blaze since early childhood in the far- 

 away East. Our hostess gave us to eat of everything that a 

 farm produces. It was a dinner bountiful beyond precedent. 

 It was a perfect delight to us when we were asked whether 

 we would have coffee or sassafras tea. Of course we took 

 sassafras tea, and I have nothing ill to say of a beverage 

 which they told us was on their breakfast-table three hundred 

 and sixty-five days in the year, though they confessed, "We 

 generally have coffee for dinner." 



We took up the journey hotel-ward, refreshed in mind and 

 body. Time forbade us to turn aside into bird byways, but 

 we had one interesting experience as we jogged on our way. 

 When we had turned into the main road that led straight to 

 our hotel we saw a large hawk sitting on a telegraph-pole. 

 The bird allowed us to approach as near as the next pole to 

 him before he showed any symptom of uneasiness. There 

 we stopped and ogled him with our glasses. It was a red- 

 tail, and the biggest one I had ever seen. Beyond a field to 

 the left a little white house stood on a side-hill. It was about 

 two hundred yards away. A rail fence separated the yard of 

 the house from a roadway where a flock of Brahma chickens 



