80 In Touch with Nature. 



such a time, I have heard strange concerts. The 

 spotted sand-pipers and marsh-wrens had not the 

 watery world to themselves, and the birds of the 

 field, in their novel surroundings, were never 

 seemingly out of place. I once saw a humming- 

 bird perched upon a bending spray of wild rice 

 with only a wide waste of waters about it, but it 

 was quite at home; and the house-wrens, that 

 should be nowhere but in an old-time garden, 

 thread the mazes of uprooted trees along the 

 river as if they had never known another and far 

 different home. We think of crows and black- 

 birds as tenants in common with the farmer, of 

 the cultivated fields, but the former is a devoted 

 beach-rover, and the blackbirds dip down to the 

 water and snatch up floating tidbits so gracefully 

 that we may call them inland gulls. 



All this reminds me of an instance of natural 

 history gone mad, but really not more absurd 

 than the average chatter about weather- changes. 

 An old fisherman remarked to me, " It is not so 

 that fish bite better when it rains. They seem to 

 me to go in out of the wet, just as we do, when a 

 shower comes up." 



