Song Birds and Water Fowt 
of Central Park in New York City, this spot, 
though so accessible and provided with several 
intersecting roads, is yet so wild and secluded 
as to retain a large number of its migrant spring 
visitors through the summer ; and thus affords 
favorable opportunities for studying their more 
interesting aspects of song and nidification. 
About the middle of May one always finds 
here not only a remarkable variety of species, 
representative of all our land-birds, but an im- 
mense number of specimens of all the various 
sorts. Leaving the train at Hackensack, two 
miles south of Englewood, and inquiring for 
the road leading thither of a gentleman who 
thought it preposterous that I should wish to 
walk, when I could just as well have ridden— 
thus betraying the fact that he was not a natu- 
ralist—I at once found myself in the midst of a 
company of clear-voiced field-sparrows. Simple 
and artless as it is, nothing in the range of mu- 
sic could have expressed more happily the spirit 
of peace pervading the pastoral scene to which 
I had come, with the harsh rattle of city pave- 
ments as yet hardly out of my ears. 
Pretention is as far from the heart of any 
sparrow as the east is from the west; but, in 
this respect, perhaps the bashful little field-spar- 
4 
