MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 



sings every day and all day long in the garden. Till within 

 a fortnight, a pair of indigo-birds would keep up their lively 

 duo for an hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole 

 gay as in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch 

 tells me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what 

 the experience of others may have been, but the only _bird I 

 have ever heard sing in the night has been the chip-bird. 

 I should say he sang about as often during the darkness as 

 cocks crow. One can hardly help fancying that he sings in 

 his dreams. 



Father of light, what sunnie seed, 

 What g_lance of day hast thou confined 

 Into this bird ? To all the breed 

 This busie ray thou hast assigned ; 

 Their magnetism works all night, 

 And dreams of Paradise and light 



On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo 

 strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a Swiss 

 clock. 



The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that end, 

 bring us the flicker every summer, and almost daily I hear 

 his wild scream and laugh close at hand, himself invisible. 

 He is a shy bird, but a few days ago I had the satisfaction of 

 studying him through the blinds as he sat on a tree within a 

 few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes good his 

 claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a 

 notion that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes 

 through the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. 

 The regular rings of such perforations which one may see in 

 almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability to 

 this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail visits us, 

 and, unseen among the currant-bushes, calls Bob White, Bob 

 White, as if he were playing at hide-and-seek with that ima 

 ginary being. A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose plea 

 sant coo (something like the muffled crow of a cock from a 

 coop covered with snow) I have sometimes heard, and whom 

 I once had the good luck to see close by me in the mulberry- 

 tree. The wild-pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for 

 many years.* Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then 

 quarters himself upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a 

 tree after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me 

 a near shot from my study- window one drizzly day for several 



* They made their appearance again this summer (1870). 



