SORROW 



" You call them thieves and pillagers ; but know 

 They are the winged wardens of your farms, 

 Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, 

 And from your harvests keep a hundred harms." 



LONGFELLOW. 



ON the threshold of the winter, when the sands of the 

 old year are sinking, and days are darkening in the 

 drear December, we miss more than ever the presence 

 of the birds. But although the open country is all 

 silent, and lane and copse have long been emptied of 

 their music, in 'the heart of the great city there is less of 

 change. Toilers of Babylon, in crowded court and dingy 

 attic, to whom a green field is a half -forgotten memory, 

 and the cuckoo's cry a sound unknown, are no sharers 

 in the free life of the country, know nothing of its ebb 

 and flow. 



One bird only braves with them the fog, the smoke, 

 the squalor of the city. No pinch of poverty drives his 

 hardy clan to forage in the fields. The sparrow lingers 

 by the flesh-pots all the winter through. 



