A Bouquet of Song Birds 
row beats them all; for he is the very embodi- 
ment of modesty. Sometimes he mounts a lit- 
tle way up a tree, and delivers his apologetic 
little message ; but often he is too humble even 
to do that, and will stand on the ground, throw 
up his tiny red bill, and pour forth his mild and 
sweet salute. The note of the field-sparrow is 
like a pleasant word dropped in the morning, 
that dissolves into a faint radiance for the en- 
tire day. It would be incongruous to greet its 
simple melody with boisterous praise ; there are 
some deeds for whose performance silence is 
the best applause. The song of this bird is 
much like that of the vesper-sparrow—three or 
four detached notes followed by a rippling 
sound, like the melodious drops of a broken 
stream of water ; but not so loud, rich, and as- 
sertive as in the vesper-sparrow. However, if 
the softer-voiced field-sparrow lives and over- 
comes his modesty, he will become quite as 
pleasing a singer as his better known and more 
confident brother—who, by the way, sings all 
through the day, and not merely at evening, as 
a well-known writer has mistakenly asserted. 
While almost all sparrows prefer the more open 
places to the deeper woods, this is emphatically 
true of field and vesper sparrows, that are par- 
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