THE RETURN OF THE BIRDS. 



most the entire ornithology of the State. It is a rocky 

 piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now fast relaps- 

 ing 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 by-ways, along which soldiers, laborers, 

 and truant schoolboys 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 under- 

 growth, 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, al- 

 der, spice-bush, hazel, etc., with a net-work of smilax 

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

 of a swamp beyond, which passes through this tangle- 

 wood, accounts for many of its features and produc- 

 tions, 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 lit- 

 erally throng this idle-wild ; and I have met here 

 many of the rarer species, such as the great-crested 

 fly-catcher, the solitary warbler, the blue-winged swamp- 

 warbler, the worm-eating warbler, the fox-sparrow, etc. 



