EACH AFTER ITS KIND 



season I spent at Woodchuck Lodge in the Catskills, 

 and across the road in front of the porch there, on 

 the top of an old plum-tree, a song sparrow sang 

 throughout the greater part of each summer day, 

 as did the one by the sea, going through its reper- 

 toire of five or six songs in happy iteration. It, too, 

 sang about three hundred times an hour, and nearly 

 always from the same perch, and, as most assuredly 

 was the case with the seaside bird, singing within 

 earshot of its brooding mate. But its songs bore only 

 the most remote general resemblance to those of its 

 seaside brother. When, early in August, the mowing- 

 machine laid low the grass in the meadow on the 

 edge of which the old plum-tree stood, the singer be- 

 haved as if some calamity had befallen him, as no 

 doubt there had. He disappeared from his favorite 

 perch, and I heard him no more except at long 

 intervals below the hill in another field. 



The vesper sparrow has a wilder and more pleas- 

 ing song than the song sparrow, but has no variety; 

 so far as my ear can judge, it has only the one sweet, 

 plaintive strain in which it indulges while perched 

 upon a stone or boulder or bare knoll in a hill pas- 

 ture or by a remote roadside. The charm of its song 

 is greatly enhanced by the soft summer twilight in 

 which it is so often uttered; it sounds the vespers of 

 the fields. The vesper sparrow is invariably a ground- 

 builder, placing its nest of dry grass in the open 

 with rarely a weed or tuft of grass to mark its site. 



171 



