20 WAKE-ROBIN 



Bess attractions for all comers. Here one may study 

 almost the entire ornithology of the State. It is 

 a rocky piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now 

 fast relapsing into the wildness and freedom of 

 nature, and marked by those half-cultivated, half- 

 wild features which birds and boys love. It is 

 bounded on two sides by the village and highway, 

 crossed at various points by carriage- roads, and 

 threaded in all directions by paths and byways, 

 along which soldiers, laborers, and truant school- 

 boys are passing at all hours of the day. It is so 

 far escaping from the axe and the bush-hook as to 

 have opened communication with the forest and 

 mountain beyond by straggling lines of cedar, laurel, 

 and blackberry. The ground is mainly occupied 

 with cedar and chestnut, with an undergrowth, in 

 many places, of heath and bramble. The chief 

 feature, however, is a dense growth in the centre, 

 consisting of dogwood, water-beech, swamp-ash, 

 alder, spice-bush, hazel, etc., with a network of 

 smilax and frost-grape. A little zigzag stream, the 

 draining of a swamp beyond, which passes through 

 this tanglewood, accounts for many of its features 

 and productions, if not for its entire existence. 

 Birds that are not attracted by the heath, or the 

 cedar and chestnut, are sure to find some excuse for 

 visiting this miscellaneous growth in the centre. 

 Most of the common birds literally throng this idle- 

 wild; and I have met here many of the rarer spe- 

 cies, such as the great-crested flycatcher, the soli- 

 tary warbler, the blue-winged swamp warbler, the 



