MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 21 



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

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

 within quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trou 

 vaille would be impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And 

 yet the mere taming of the neighborhood 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 pai-tly 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 1 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 mess 

 mates 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 morn 

 ing ; and, during the early summer he preludes his 

 matutinal ejaculation of peivee with a slender whistle, 



