08 IN BIRD LAND. 
“roughing it’? Strange to say, I saw no more fox- 
sparrows until the twenty-eighth, when the weather 
had grown warm. ‘That was also the day on which 
I saw the first winter wren scudding about in the 
brush-heaps and wood-piles and perking up his tail 
in the most approved bantam fashion. It may be 
a poor joke, but the thought came of its own accord, 
that if brevity is the soul of wit, this little wren 
must have a very witty tail; and it really is an 
amusing appendage, held up at an acute angle with 
the bird’s sloping back. 
As I strolled along the edge of the woods on the 
same day, the fine rhythmic trill of the bush-spar- 
row reached my ear. He was celebrating his return 
to this sylvan resort, and his voice was in excellent 
trim ; the fact is, I never heard him acquit himself 
quite so well, not even in May. Miss Lucy Larcom, 
of tender and sacred memory, has happily charac- 
terized this triller’s song in melodious verse : — 
“One syllable, clear and soft 
As a raindrop’s silvery patter, 
Or a tinkling fairy-bell, heard aloft, 
In the midst of the merry chatter 
Of robin and linnet and wren and jay, — 
One syllable oft repeated ; 
He has but a word to say, 
And of that he will not be cheated.” 
But why was not the grass-finch, his relative of 
the fields, in just as good voice when he arrived on 
the thirty-first? The last two springs this bird had 
to be on his singing-grounds several days before he 
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