222 IN BIRD LAND. 
the poor miller’s pardon, I felt happy in befriending 
the charming fairy of a bird. With gladness throb- 
bing in every corpuscle, it was not in my place to 
question Nature’s economy in making the sacrifice 
of one life necessary to the sustenance of another. 
Tramping on, I presently found myself in a marsh 
stretching back from the river-bank. As I stood in 
the tangle of tall grass and weeds, listening to the 
songs and twitters of various birds, the sentiment, 
if not the precise lines, of Lowell, came to mind like 
a draught of invigorating air, — 
“Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight 
Who cannot in their various incomes share, 
From every season drawn, of shade and light, 
Who sees in them but levels brown and bare. 
Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free 
On them its largess of variety, 
For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders 
Fane. 
But what was that sharp chirp? It instantly drew 
my thoughts from the marsh itself and the poet’s 
tribute. Opera-glass in hand, I softly stole near the 
bushy clump from which the sound came. Ah! 
there the bird was, tilting uneasily on a slender twig. 
The swamp-sparrow! It was the first time I had 
positively identified this bird in my own neighbor- 
hood, — not, I suppose, because it had not been pres- 
ent often and again, but because I had been too 
dull of sight to see it. Then came a glad memory. 
I recalled the peculiar circumstances under which I 
had seen my first swamp-sparrow, hundreds of miles 
