TIME AND CHANGE 



its coming and its going mean much to you. And 

 it becomes a part of your life when you have taken 

 heed of it with interest and affection, when you have 

 established associations with it, when it voices the 

 spring or the summer to you, when it calls up the 

 spirit of the woods or the fields or the shore. When 

 year after year you have heard the veery in the 

 beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or 

 the wood thrush May after May in the groves where 

 you have walked or sat, and the bobolink summer 

 after summer in the home meadows, or the vesper 

 sparrow in the upland pastures where you have loi 

 tered as a boy or mused as a man, these birds will 

 really be woven into the texture of your life. 



What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot 

 recall; what a joy they have been to me I know well. 

 In a new place, amid strange scenes, theirs are the 

 voices and the faces of old friends. In Bermuda the 

 bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed 

 to make American territory of it. Our birds had 

 annexed the island despite the Britishers. 



For many years I have in late April seen the red 

 poll warbler, perhaps for only a single day, flitting 

 about as I walked or worked. It is usually my first 

 warbler, and my associations with it are very pleas 

 ing. But I really did not know how pleasing until, 

 one March day, when I was convalescing from a 

 serious illness in one of our sea-coast towns, I 

 chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacant lot 

 254 



