SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 
Our interest in wild song-birds must in- 
crease apace with the narrowing of our wooded 
areas, and in proportion to the constant lessen- 
ing of our opportunities for ornithological 
study at first hand. As our thrushes and 
orioles and warblers one by one take flight, 
we suddenly, in realizing our loss, feel in a 
new way the sweetness of their voices. When 
we were children, even if we lived in the heart 
of the city, we often had glimpses of the 
country with its great dense woods and its 
green fields, its orchards, and its cottages 
covered with morning-glory vines. In those 
days the brown-thrush, the cat-bird, and the 
cardinal grosbeak, sang in every thicket and 
throughout every orchard. Now these charm- 
ing little lyrists are gone from many a former 
haunt ; indeed there are wide areas of country, 
where they used to nest and sing, in which 
they never will be seen in a wild state again. 
Not long since I returned, after twenty 
years’ absence, to a neighborhood in which 
my infancy was spent. I remembered a cer- 
tain brook in a little field, a crooked lazy little 
stream bordered with yellow willows and water 
hazel, where the cat-bird loved to swing and 
sing in shade and sun. It was with an inde- 
scribable regret that I found the willows and 
hazel all gone and the brook, sunken under 
ground, groping its way through tubular tiles. 
Where wide woods of beech and suyar-trees 
