8 MY GAKDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 de- 

 grees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably with- 

 in, 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 many successive committees 

 of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing 

 gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely 

 exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earli- 

 est mess of green peas ; his all the mulberries I had 

 fancied mine. But if he get also the lion's share of the 

 raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones 

 in the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a mo- 

 mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White 

 Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and knows 

 to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long 

 enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few 

 years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. 

 I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Mean- 

 while a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, 

 seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming 

 perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself 

 with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them 

 from day to day till they should have secreted sugar 



