!Hn ID JSarn 



It has been suggested that the bird is becoming 

 extinct. Can this be true? Probably not, but 

 rather they seem to have sought new quarters 

 where the villainous feather-hunters and con- 

 temptible collector cannot find them. This seems 

 the more likely because, late in October, we some- 

 times find the air, some bright, frosty morning, 

 full of these birds, evidently migrating. A melan- 

 choly change of habit this, after many years when 

 they were as strictly resident as our chickens or 

 the nasty sparrows now in the city streets. 



E.ats and mice, too commonplace to be men- 

 tioned, and even the little weasel, the deadly foe 

 of both, found in the old barn a congenial home, 

 notwithstanding the most feral of domestic cats 

 that I have ever seen here nightly made his rounds. 

 Not one of these would rouse much interest, be 

 the history thereof told never so cleverly. But 

 bats, about which people know so little, always 

 command attention. Several were sleeping in the 

 old barn, and one that I disturbed was not long 

 in regaining his senses, and flew about as easily 

 as ever. At dusk he threaded the mazy tangle of 

 an old forest's tree tops. Bats are not bird-like, 

 although exquisitely graceful. They are suggest- 

 ive of the uncanny conditions in nature, of gloom 

 and hollow mockeries, of everything the opposite 

 of bird life. Bats are living fossils, relics of a dead 

 past that have escaped death, and no healthy 

 mind can be buoyed, cheered, exhilarated by such 

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