138 BY-WAVS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
dusky depths of the woods, hearing which the 
old plantation negroes used to sing their 
watermelon rhymes : 
“ Plant yo’ milions w’en de rain-crow holler, 
Ef yo’ doan dey wont be wo’f er quar’ dollar! 
Ki fo’ de rain, 
Ki fo’ de crow, 
Ye orter see how de wa’r milion grow!” 
It is not so remarkable, after all, that the 
cuckoo is called Rain-crow throughout the en- 
tire area of its habitat, for he seems always 
able to conjure up a shower within a day or 
two of his first appearance in the spring. I 
suspect that he holds his solemn voice until 
the rain is at hand, so as to make a fine artis- 
tic unity out of it and the depressing gloom of 
a rising storm-cloud. 
The haw-groves that usually fringe the mar- 
gin of the mountain glades are the Yellow- 
bill’s favorite resorts when it first reaches the 
hill-country from the south. Here it meets 
the blue-jay, the brown-thrush and the cardi- 
nal-grosbeak, permanent residents and im- 
placable claimants of all the fruits and insects 
of these favored spots. 
A glade is a peculiarly Southern woodland 
feature, not found in perfection north of Ten- 
nessee, a miniature prairie, surrounded by 
scrubby trees and groves or thickets of plum 
and haw-bushes, and covered, as a rule, with 
wild wire-grass and tufts of sedge. Every one 
who has spent much time in the wildwoods 
has noted how few are the small birds inhabit- 
ing forests of tall thickly-growing timber; but 
these glades, set in the midst of immense 
tracts of pine and oak woods, are oases of 
