SPRING ARRIVAL OF THE BIRDS. 4:3 



over one another in such a manner as to make the song 

 far-reaching and very effective. J^o other sound so 

 hallows the woods, and places where I find these artists 

 congregated, if within reach, I visit again and again. 



It seems curious that a bird voice will sometimes fill 

 so large a place in the memory, to the exclusion of 

 other things that would appear to be much more prom- 

 inent. In a carriage journey of several hundred miles, 

 no other places or events were so stamped on my mind 

 as two pieces of woodland, in which the veeries were 

 abundant and unusually tuneful. On the return we 

 went many miles out of our way to stay one night in 

 the vicinity to hear their morning and evening songs. 

 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in speaking of the objects of 

 interest enjoyed at "Windsor Castle, says that none 

 others so stirred his heart with pleasurable emotions as 

 the hawthorn trees in blossom, and the notes of an 

 English cuckoo in the Park. " Of all I saw and heard 

 there, the two notes of the cuckoo will survive all other 

 memories." 



The bobolinks {Dolichoiiyx oryzivorus) make their 

 appearance in this latitude early in May, some of them 

 even in April, but these earlier comers show by their 

 disconsolate manner that their surroundings are not yet 

 congenial. They are summer birds and need their nat- 

 ural accessories, meadows of waving timothy, and green 

 pastures flecked with the gold of buttercups. A coun- 

 try meadow without this cheerful, conspicuous singer 

 in buff and black, would be like the big, brown country 

 barn without its twittering swallow about its eaves and 



