MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 19 



I never could divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled 

 me in the same way, perched at high noon in a pine, 

 springing their watchman s rattle when they flitted away 

 from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy 

 heads along as a man does a wheel-barrow. 



Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country 

 is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck s nest 

 -within a quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trouvaille 

 would be impossible now as Kidd s treasure. And yet the 

 mere taming of the neighbourhood does not quite satisfy me 

 as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe 

 in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the 

 miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a house, and 

 constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth 

 of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy 

 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 primogeniture 1 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 



