Prelude 



is worth mentioning is the fact that while other 

 friends come and go, one never loses the friends 

 he makes among the birds, for his attachment 

 is to the class, not to the individual. Speci- 

 mens die, but the species abide. One never 

 thinks of age in connection with these creat- 

 ures. They seem to have discovered the elixir 

 of life, and to maintain the perennial freshness 

 of youth. Year after year they arrive at just 

 about the same time in the spring, sing the 

 same old songs, repeat their love-passages, nest 

 in the same fashion, and perpetuate all their 

 graceful ways and charming oddities. The old 

 man finds his cherry-trees plundered by appar- 

 ently the very same robins that he saw in his 

 boyhood in his father's orchard, and drives 

 away the same everlasting crows from his corn- 

 field. The woodpecker's vigorous tapping 

 never becomes feeble, nor the song sparrow less 

 blithesome. The burden of sorrow is never 

 lifted from the ever-lamenting pewee, and in 

 season and out of season, with sometimes pro- 

 voking equanimity, the chickadee is brimful of 

 merriment. These sights and sounds are 

 among the stabilities of life, the changeless 

 things that give equilibrium to nature, binding 

 the present to the past, and spreading a pleas- 



