TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 289 



I did not therefore jump to the conchision that 

 the phoebe was a berry-eater. What it wanted 

 was the worm in the berry. How do I know? 

 Because I saw it extract something from the 

 berry and liy away. 



A French missionary, said to have been a 

 good naturalist, writing in this country in 1634, 

 makes this curious statement about our hum- 

 ming-bird: "This bird, as one might say, dies, 

 or, to speak more correctly, puts itself to sleep 

 in the month of October, living fastened to 

 some little branchlet of a tree by the feet, and 

 wakes up in the month of April when the 

 flowers are in abundance, and sometimes later, 

 and for that cause is called in the Mexican 

 tongue the "Revived." How could the good 

 missionary ever have been led to make such a 

 statement 1 The actual finding of the bird win- 

 tering in that way would have been the proof 

 science demands, and nothing short of that. 



A boy in the interior of the State wrote to 

 me the other day that while in the field looking 

 after Indian arrow-heads he had seen a brown 

 and gray bird with a black mark running 

 through the eye, and that the bird walked in- 

 stead of hopped. He said it had a high, shrill 

 whistle and flew like a meadow-lark. This boy 

 is a natural observer; he noted that the bird 

 was a walker. Most of the birds hop or jump, 

 keeping both feet together. This boy heard his 

 bird afterward in the edge of the evening, and 

 "followed it quite a ways, but could not get a 

 glimpse of it. " He had failed to note the crest 



