BIRD TRAITS. 



While birds as a race have many habits and 

 instincts in common, their family differences are 

 strongly marked. The hawk and the humming- 

 bird answer equally well to the scientist's defi- 

 nition of a bird, but Napoleon and a bonbon 

 maker answer equally well to his definition of 

 man. The destroyer and the confectioner, 

 whether among men or birds, have different 

 ways of looking at life, and of dealing with their 

 animate and inanimate surroundings. In hu- 

 man communities the principal actors are the 

 farmers, artisans, merchants, priests and teach- 

 ers, soldiers, mariners, artists, knaves, and idlers. 

 Perhaps I am over fanciful, but against each of 

 these classes save one — the merchant — I can 

 set without hesitation a group of birds whose 

 life currents seem to me to run in as various 

 channels as those of the great groups in human 

 society. 



My abstract farmer is a burly fellow who 

 rises early, whistles cheerily if the sun be bright, 

 works in all weather, keeps to the fields rather 

 than to the forest, and to whose senses nothing 



