Song Birds and Water Fowl 
there is a world of difference in disposition 
between this snappy little specimen and his 
disconsolate sister, the grief-stricken, Rachel- 
tempered pewee. If, according to the ortho- 
dox decision, the flycatchers be not strictly 
admissible into a bouquet of songsters, they at 
least find their mission in serving the purpose 
of an effective spray of green leaves among a 
floral group, to enhance in others what is lack- 
ing in themselves. The song of the indigo-bird, 
which was holding forth in more open land, can 
hardly be called good or bad, as it now stands, 
but could easily drift into either. It reveals the 
identity of the singer, however, by a peculiarly 
throaty note in the middle of the phrase. 
In a grassy apple-orchard near by, a half- 
hour’s entertainment was afforded by a tiny 
songster, Mistress Wren —that little brown 
creature which is one of the neatest specimens 
of concentrated happiness in feathers that ex- 
ists—an endless cadenza. AsI saw her enter 
a hole in an apple-tree with a bit of downy 
substance in her bill, and soon after emerge, 
minus the same, it was the strongest circum- 
stantial evidence that she was putting the 
finishing touches on her summer home, in the 
snuggest and most picturesque of castles. But 
36 
