"From Haunts of Coot and Hern" 117 



I learned much on that trip, both of birds and of methods of 

 observation. Mr. Deane is closer to Nature's heart than most 

 men, and of him she seems to have made a confidant. We 

 reached the English Lake club-house just at dusk, but all the 

 bird voices were not hushed. While waiting the call to sup- 

 per we strolled down to the banks of the little flooded inlet 

 which makes a water highway for the rowboats from the house 

 to the river. A vesper sparrow sang to us as we walked 

 through the deepening darkness. From the damp thicket on 

 the further side of the inlet came the voice of the Maryland 

 yellow-throat. He was as insistent in his calling as is the 

 custom with his tribe when once roused to vocal effort, but 

 even the yellow-throat's insistence gave way before the 

 screams and scoldings of a pair of robins. I have heard 

 robins raise disturbances before. They are often the com- 

 mon scolds of a bird neighborhood, but the performance of 

 the pair that we heard that night rather outdid in volume of 

 sound anything of which I had supposed the robin to be capa- 

 ble. It was too dark to investigate the cause of the trouble, 

 and so the matter was put off until sunrise. The robins 

 apparently wished to make it certain that we were impressed 

 with their trouble, if trouble it were, for the last thing that 

 we heard on closing the door of the dining-room behind us 

 was a noise that was nothing less than a screech, and it came 

 from both birds in unison. 



Just as the sun touched the treetops the next morning we 

 were out of doors. The song sparrow was attune, an orchard 

 oriole piped to us from a maple at the doorstep, and a brown 

 thrasher was singing somewhere in the wet thicket beyond the 

 boat-houses. The robins were silent. I went directly to the 

 scene of the disturbance of the night before, and soon found 



