220 A seat VER’S APRIL. 
in a voice not more than half as loud as what 
he had been using; after which, as if to cap 
the climax, he several times followed the tune 
with a detached phrase or two in a still fainter 
voice. This last was pretty certainly an im- 
provised cadenza, such a thing as I do not re- 
member ever to have heard before from Melo- 
spiza melodia. 
The song of the fox sparrow has at times an 
almost thrush-like quality; and the bird him- 
self, as he flies up in front of you, might easily 
be mistaken for some member of that noble 
family. Once, indeed, when I saw him eating 
burning-bush berries in a Boston garden, I was 
half ready to believe that I had before my eyes 
a living example of the development of one 
species out of another, —a finch already well 
on his way to become a thrush. Most often, 
however, his voice puts me in mind of the car- 
dinal grosbeak’s; his voice, and perhaps still 
more his cadence, and especially his practice of 
the portamento. 
The 11th of the month was sunny, and the 
next morning I came back from my accustomed 
rounds under a sense of bereavement: the fox 
sparrows were gone. Where yesterday there 
had been hundreds of them, now I could find 
only two silent stragglers. They had been well 
scattered over the township, — here a flock and 
