PHASES OF BIRD LIFE. 161 
wooing in a somewhat rudely persistent and obtru- 
sive fashion. Society would soon ostracize the 
human suitor having such manners, and might even 
consider him amenable to the civil courts, and put 
him in jail as a character unfit to be abroad. How- 
ever, if hot pursuit, brazen manners, and _half-coer- 
cive measures are considered “good form” in 
bird land, we of the human genus are the last who 
have a right to find fault, for are we not the most 
conventional beings on the face of the earth? You 
might almost as well be in limbo or inferno as out 
of style. Was there not a time when even the 
flaming sunflower was regarded as the highest 
emblem of the beautiful, merely because it was the 
“ fad,’’? and not because anybody really felt that it 
possessed special zesthetic qualities? ‘ People who 
live in glass houses ought not to throw stones,” is 
the saucy challenge of the merry chickadee to his 
human critic, as he dashes, like an animated “ nigger- 
chaser,” after the little Dulcinea whom he has 
marked for his bride. Then he stops, and, balancing 
on a spray, whistles his sweetest minor tune, /¢-e- 
w-e-, pe-e-e-w-e-e ; which, being interpreted, prob- 
ably means, — 
“‘ Does not all the blood within me 
Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee, 
As the spring to meet the sunshine? ” 
No doubt many a feathered swain is smitten, and 
smitten very deeply too, with Cupid’s arrow, flung 
by some charming capturer of hearts. A little boy’s 
love-letter to a lassie who had taken his throb- 
II 
