Water Fowl 
effusive tone and temperament, upon its sombre 
shores. ‘The everlasting hills may be symboli- 
cal of limitless duration ; but the ceaseless, 
eager throbbing of the sea’s immeasurable ex- 
panse is certainly Nature’s grandest emblem of 
eternal “fe. Water, salt or fresh, is a strangely 
vital substance, half articulate, ever  strug- 
gling blindly upward into life and melody, a 
corporeal sister of the evanescent wind. ‘There 
is no passion to be found in Nature like that of 
_the angry sea. The very essence of music’s 
undertones is in the fluid thunder of the ocean's 
breakers, and in the roar of the majestic water- 
fall; while the cascade and the brook beguile 
the ear with their delicious melting chaos of 
unrhythmic and uncadenced tumblings;_ ut- 
terly devoid, it is true, of the technical quali- 
ties of melody, yet the very incarnation of its 
spirit. 
[Ornithology that drives one to the woods, 
the fields, the shore—anywhere but to the 
stuffed collection—is open sesamé to unlock 
the door to many kindred forms of pleasure 
and inquiry.| Any ornithologist is very nar- 
row-minded, who, in all his wanderings, finds 
only birds. Around them, as a nucleus, will 
crystallize a thousand objects of interest, for 
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