A Bouquet of Song Birds 
is always aggravating, the solution of a question 
often comes in such a manner as to be worth a 
long interrogation. 
Throughout the woods, and especially along 
the outer edge, slantingly perched on a limb, 
or furtively flying from bush to bush, were 
numerous drooping cuckoos, the black-billed 
species, with noticeably red eyes. They are 
not nesting yet. They wait until caterpillar 
time, late in June. They do not believe in 
rearing a family until they see their way clear 
to provide for it. In a cultivated field ad- 
joining, that less woodsy bird, the Baltimore 
oriole, was helping herself to building material 
out of the rags and tatters of a last year’s scare- 
crow, which had fulfilled its mission, if it ever 
had any; and, near by, the pewee had begun 
the plaintive utterance of its brief elegiac, 
which, despite its sadness, somehow falls with 
much the same grateful effect upon the ear as 
upon the eye fall the cooling shadows of the 
leaves, striking athwart the massive trunk of a 
sunlit beech. . 
I was rather surprised, so late in the season, 
to encounter frequently the white-breasted nut- 
hatch, more of a winter emblem for this _lati- 
tude; not more musical, but considerably 
13 
