FIRST-COMERS. 47 
door. The eggs are pea-green, scrawled, as though by a pen, 
with black lines and dots. 
The food of the chippy during the spring and summer 
consists largely of small insects, and he searches carefully 
through the blossoming trees for the minute bugs that in- 
fest the leaves and flowers, occasionally nipping off the sweet 
and tender stamens of the apple and cherry blossoms, or 
taking wee bites out of the early currants. He flits quietly 
and busily all over the shrubbery, an image of a happy and 
contented little workman, tra-la-la-ing in a fine trilling 
voice, that would be shrill were it not so sweet, an aria 
from some bright bird-opera. 
The chippy is so easily watched that I do not propose to 
tell all I have learned about it, and thus rob a reader of the 
pleasure of learning its beautiful ways for himself. You 
will not find it difficult to become acquainted with these 
pigmy sparrows after you have recognized their chestnut 
caps among your rose-bushes. You will see, also, that you 
may tame them and teach them to come to you for crumbs. 
They are almost the only birds that the insolent English 
sparrows will be friendly toward; and they are wonder- 
fully devoted to their young: but I am forgetting that the 
reader was to find all this out for himself! 
I have in mind the delta of a river whose shores are so 
