152 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
used to be, fields of wheat and corn lay green 
and smooth almost to the horizon’s rim. What 
a loss the absent birds were felt to be! In 
fact, when, after much plaintive sauntering 
over the altered grounds, I chanced to hear a 
lonely purple finch twittering in a hedge of 
bots @ arc, I felt a thrill of delight which was 
like an electric message from my childhood’s 
days. In the streets of the village which had 
shrunken, as if in some mysterious proportion 
to the widening of the surrounding plains of 
agricultural thrift, foraged a well-fed flock of 
detestable English sparrows. This, I thought, 
is advanced enlightenment—a covered ditch 
for a brook, a prim hedge in lieu of a wild 
plum thicket, an orchard displacing an odor- 
ous grove of wild crab-apple and these pests 
of sparrows usurping the homes of the cardi- 
nal-bird and the thrushes! 
From almost any little country town, even 
in the West, one must now, as a rule, make a 
long flight into the most neglected nooks of 
the rural neighborhoods, before one can find 
the haunts of the more interesting songsters. 
The elect few of the feathered choir, like the 
choice spirits of the outer circle of young 
poets, are fond of utter, limitless freedom ; 
they do not relish the fragrance, however 
sweet, of over-cultured gardens and bowers. 
True enough, the blue-bird warbles very con- 
tentedly on the best kept fence-row as he 
watches the ploughman turn up the tid-bits from 
the furrow; and it is an almost savage ten- 
derness that quavers from his throat as he 
pounces upon the dislodged worm, his wings 
gleaming like some precious, doubly purified 
