32 OUR FEATHERED FRIENDS. 
learn at home with their fathers and mothers and 
brothers and sisters. 
The school-house is anywhere, in the yard or the 
woods or fields. If you take the trouble to listen 
and keep very quiet in midsummer, you will be able to 
see and hear these bird schools going on at a rate that 
will make you smile and think that birds are real people. 
You can see the children in the nests or on the 
branches of trees, or even on the ground, learning 
musical notes, and the letters of their alphabet, and 
running the bird scale, just like any class in school. 
Every now and then you will see them skip out for a 
drink of water at the pump or brook. They may not 
hurry back at once, but stop to look at themselves in 
the water and to frolic about in the ferns and grass. 
Birds have a very happy childhood. It will pay any 
child or grown person to spend a whole summer or 
autumn in studying them and their ways. This would 
be much better than wishing one could go somewhere, 
when one hasn’t the money to go with, or being un- 
happy because one hasn’t fine clothes and houses. 
Young birds do not seem to be very much afraid of 
us. They only look a little surprised and try to hop a 
bit faster if we go too near them. 
See how queer the tops of their heads look, with the 
baby down still sticking out in little tufts through the 
thicker feathers. Their lips, too, along the edges of 
the bill! — how yellow they are, as though they had just 
been eating new spring butter. 
