M Y GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. ? 



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 rasp 

 berries, 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 

 undoubtedly 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 15 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 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 forfeited that 

 superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He 

 has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from 



