Vol. XXXVI 1 



1919 



Bailey, In Mernoriam: Olive Thome Miller. • 167 



content each in its native spot, with brooks singing of joy and 

 good cheer, with mountains preaching divine peace and rest!" 1 

 Freed from city life and the tortures imposed by her profound 

 human sympathy, each gift of fancy and imagination, each rare 

 quality of spirit, joined in the celebration of the new excursion 

 into fields elysian. But while each sight she saw was given glamour 

 and charm by her imagination and enthusiasm, her New England 

 conscience ruled her every word and note, and not one jot or tittle 

 was let by, no word was set down, that could not pass muster 

 before the bar of scientific truth. 



Mrs. Miller's first bird book was published in 1885 and the others 

 followed in quick succession although they were interlarded with 

 magazine articles and books on other subjects — as ' The Woman's 

 Club,' 1890, 'Our Home Pets,' 1894, 'Four Handed Folk,' 1896, 

 and a series of children's stories, 1904 to 1907. Her eleven bird 

 books, published by the Houghton, Mifflin Company, were 'Bird 

 Ways,' 1885, 'In Nesting Time,' 1887, 'Little Brothers of the Air,' 

 1892, 'A Bird Lover in the West,' 1894, 'Upon the Tree Tops,' 

 1897, 'The First Book of Birds,' 1899, 'The Second Book of Birds,' 

 1901, 'True Bird Stories from my Note-Books,' 1902, 'With the 

 Birds in Maine,' 1903, ' The Bird our Brother,' 1908, and her last 

 book, ' The Children's Book of Birds ' — a juvenile form of the 

 First and Second Book of Birds — 1915. 



The newspaper and magazine articles of this second period of 

 Mrs. Miller's literary work, beginning with the time when she first 

 began to study birds, were published not only in the principal 

 religious weeklies and others of the former channels, but by vari- 

 ous syndicates, in 'Harper's Bazar,' and the 'Atlantic Monthly.' 

 They included not only a large number of bird papers, some of 

 which appeared later in her books, but also articles on general 

 subjects, proving her friend's statement, for now that her reputa- 

 tion had become established on a basis of fact, the public was ready 

 to profit by her "sentiments and opinions." 



Her last book of field notes — 'With the Birds in Maine' — 

 was published in 1903, when she was seventy -two, after which time 

 she was able to do very little active field work and her writing was 

 confined mainly to children's books. 



i Upon the Tree-Tops', 3, 1897. 



