36 BIRDS THROUGH AN OPERA-GLASS. — 
IX. 
RUBY-THROATED HUMMING-BIRD. 
Dip you ever see a humming-bird sitting on a 
bare branch of a towering tree? Until you have 
you will scarcely appreciate what a wee mite of a 
bird it is. Indeed I find it hard to think of it 
asa bird at all. It seems more like a fairy, “a 
littering fragment of a rainbow,” as Audubon 
calls it, or as some one else has said, — 
“‘ Like a gem or a blossom on pinions,”’ 
something too dainty and airy to have even three 
inches of actual length. It seems like the winged 
spirit of color as it comes humming through the 
air to hover over the flowers on the piazza, its 
body like green beryl, and its throat glancing fire. 
Like Puck it might boast that it could “put a 
girdle round about the earth in forty minutes,” 
for while we are wondering at its friendliness it 
darts off and is gone like the flash of a diamond. 
In this vicinity the garden of Mrs. Bagg seems 
to be one of the favorite haunts of the humming- 
birds, and she has kindly given me some notes on 
her experiences with them. She says :— 
“In confinement they do not appear to pine for 
freedom, beating themselves against the wires like 
other birds, but seem contented and at home from 
the first. I kept a pair caged a whole summer. 
