WINTER BIRDS ABOUT BOSTON. 199 
in evergreen trees, and so near the road that I 
had no call tocommit trespass. Evergreens are 
their usual resort, —so, at least, I gather from 
books, — but I have seen them picking up prov- 
ender from a bare-looking last year’s garden. 
Natives of the inhospitable North, they have 
learned by long experience how to adapt them- 
selves to circumstances. If one resource fails, 
there is always another to be tried. Let us 
hope that they even know how to show fight 
upon occasion. 
The purple finch — a small copy of the pine 
grosbeak, as the indigo bird is of the blue gros- 
beak —is a summer rather than a winter bird 
with us ; yet he sometimes passes the cold sea- 
son in Eastern Massachusetts, and even in 
Northern New Hampshire. I have never heard 
him sing more gloriously than once when the 
ground was deep under the snow; a wonder- 
fully sweet and protracted warble, poured out 
while the singer circled about in the air with a 
kind of half-hovering flight. 
As I was walking briskly along a West End 
street, one cold morning in March, I heard a 
bird’s note close at hand, and, looking down, 
discovered a pair of these finches in a front 
yard. The male, in bright plumage, was flit- 
ting about his mate, calling anxiously, while 
she, poor thing, sat motionless upon the snow, 
