MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. IJ 



birds were almost as indifferent to my passing as common 

 poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has become 

 scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, no doubt, is 

 partly to blame for some of our losses. But some old friends 

 are constant. Wilson s thrush comes every year to remind 

 me of that most poetic of ornithologists. He flits before 

 me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A 

 pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in 

 the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the same 

 brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods 

 of five each are raised there every summer. How do they 

 settle their claim to the homestead ? By what right of pri 

 mogeniture ? Once the children of a man employed about 

 the place oologized the nest, and the pewees left us for a 

 year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates 

 of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot 

 the albatross. But the pewees came back at last, and one 

 of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window 

 that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on 

 the wing with the unerring precision a stately Trasteverina 

 shows in the capture of her smaller deer. The pewee is 

 the first bird to pipe up in the morning; and during the 

 early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of pewee 

 with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He 

 saddens with the season, and, as summer declines, he 

 changes his note to eheu, pewee! as if in lamentation. Had 

 he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a plaintive 

 tale to tell about him. He is so lamiliar as often to pursue 

 a fly through the open window into my library . 



There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old 

 friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but 

 has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among 

 its boughs, to which I cannot say, 



Many light hearts and wings, 

 Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers. 



My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm 

 were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson s thrush, nor 

 hear in haying-time the metallic ring of his song, that justifies 

 his rustic name of scythe-whet. I protect my game as 

 jealously as an English squire. If anybody had oologized 

 a certain cuckoo s nest I know of (I have a pair in my 

 garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my 

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