THE MALE RUBY-THROAT. 145 



talking, the scene was reenacted. The 

 stranger had returned, and the two birds 

 were shooting hither and thither through the 

 trees, the widow squeaking and spreading 

 her tail at a prodigious rate. The new-comer 

 did not alight (it could n't), and there was 

 no determining its sex. It may have been 

 the recreant husband and father, unable 

 longer to deny himself a look at his bairns, 

 who knows? Or it may have been some 

 bachelor or widower who had come a-woo- 

 ing. One thing is certain, husband, 

 lover, or inquisitive stranger, he had no 

 encouragement to come again. 



As if to heighten the dramatic interest of 

 our studies (I come now to the promised 

 mystery), we had already had the singular 

 good fortune to find a male humming-bird 

 who seemed to be stationed permanently in 

 a tall ash-tree, standing by itself in a recent 

 clearing, at a distance of a mile or more 

 from our widow's orchard. Day after day, 

 for at least a fortnight (from the 2d to the 

 15th of July), he remained there. One or 

 both of us went almost daily to call upon 

 him, and, as far as we could make out, he 

 seldom absented himself from his post for 



