O MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as their latest 

 fledglings are firm enough of wing to attempt the long row 

 ing-match that is before them. On the other hand, the wild- 

 geese probably do not leave the North till they are frozen 

 out, for I have heard their bugles sounding southward so 

 late as the middle of December. What may be called local 

 migrations are doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I 

 have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and 

 whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock 

 of cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my 

 hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the 

 local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never 

 before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, handsomest 

 of flycatchers, built in my orchard; though I always know 

 where to find them within half a mile. The rose-breasted 

 grosbeak has been a familiar bird in Brookline (three miles 

 away), yet I never saw one here till last July, when I found a 

 female busy among my raspberries and surprisingly bold. I 

 hope she was prospecting with a view to settlement in our 

 garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, 

 and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win 

 over so delightful a neighbour. 



The return of the robin is commonly announced by the 

 newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a 

 watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. 

 And such his appearance in the orchard and garden un 

 doubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory thrush, 

 he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him when the 

 thermometer marked 1 5 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, 

 armed impregnably within, like Emerson s Titmouse, and as 

 cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among 

 people who do not value themselves less for being fond of 

 cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and 

 his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted 

 with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and 

 the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether 

 of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy 

 into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to 

 fall. But for a that and twice as muckle J s a that, I would 

 not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of 

 Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly for 

 feited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. 



