Prelude 
is worth mentioning is the fact that while other 
friends come and go, one never loses the friends 
he makes among the birds, for his attachment 
is to the class, not to the individual. Speci- 
mens die, but the species abide. One never 
thinks of age in connection with these creat- 
ures. They seem to have discovered the elixir 
of life, and to maintain the perennial freshness 
of youth. Year after year they arrive at just 
about the same time in the spring, sing the 
same old songs, repeat their love-passages, nest 
in the same fashion, and perpetuate all their 
graceful ways and charming oddities. The old 
man finds his cherry-trees plundered by appar- 
ently the very same robins that he saw in his 
boyhood in his father’s orchard, and drives 
away the same everlasting crows from his corn- 
field. . The woodpecker’s vigorous tapping 
never becomes feeble, nor the song sparrow less 
blithesome. The burden of sorrow is never 
lifted from the ever-lamenting pewee, and in 
season and out of season, with sometimes pro- 
voking equanimity, the chickadee is brimful of 
merriment. These sights and sounds are 
among the stabilities of life, the changeless 
things that give equilibrium to nature, binding 
the present to the past, and spreading a pleas- 
2 
