a 
PAESPOURPLE FINCH. Ui 
its searchings for food among the briers and shrubs of our lawns and 
gardens, it will alight upon some lowly and convenient branch to 
plume itself and give utterance to a low, single and rather mellifluous 
clonk, as if completely satisfied and happy. with itself and the bursting life 
and odors about it. It is at such times and under such circumstances, 
the whole enhanced by a bright sun, that the Purple Finch displays his 
glory ; and the fortunate observer cannot fail of being impressed with his 
beauty. 
I will remember the first time that I ever saw this bird in close prox- 
imity ; and his sudden advent upon my admiring gaze has served to 
stamp indelibly the place and circumstances upon my memory ; so much 
so in fact, that whenever he is brought to my view, the whole phantom 
train of the intervening years is hurriedly encompassed, and I am again 
placed in the same spot, and engirdled by the same scenes and sur- 
roundings as those in which I first beheld his flaming beauty. 
For some boyish misdemeanor, I think the emptying of my Mother's 
sugar candy or purloining from her honey store, I had been doomed to 
an imprisonment in a dark spare room, upon the first floor front of a 
pleasant country home in Northern Vermont. A few days previous to 
my unfortunate confinement, a poor stray waif of humanity, unknown, 
and with no evidence about him whereby he might have been traced, 
had in a solitary and adjacent wood been found hanging by the neck 
from a stout sapling ; dead! He had used, to accomplish his purpose, 
a scarlet scarf or kerchief of some kind, and as we, a group of horrified 
urchins gazed upon his suspended form, the brighter color of the stifling 
band which seemed to enliven and warm up the supernatural scene, left 
an indelible impress upon my mind. From the time of the discovery 
of the inanimate form of the poor homeless Frenchman, (for such he 
