20 MY GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. 



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 ekeu, pewee / as if in lamenta 

 tion. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a 

 plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar 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, 



1 Many light hearts and wings, 

 &quot;Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers.&quot; 



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 mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back 

 to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and 

 before (forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown 

 accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they 

 repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever 

 to breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, 

 preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, which 

 converted them to a little Hebraism and a great deal of 

 Medford rum. If they will not come near enough to me 

 (as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera- 

 glass a much better weapon than a gun. I would not, if 

 I could, convert them from their pretty pagan ways. The 

 only ones I sometimes have savage doubts about is the red 

 squirrel. I think he oologizes. I know he eats cherries 

 (we counted five of them at one time in a single tree, the 

 stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a 

 storm), and that he gnaws off the small end of pears to get 

 at the seeds. He steals the corn from under the noses of 



