THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 63 
scuttle to cover, shows how accurately they size up the amount of 
danger, when their size might suggest that they should be tugging 
at the maternal breast. 
An individual of our acquaintance, at the beginning of this 
winter, noticed among a large flock of English sparrows two black 
individuals among the flock, and soon, on the lot paying a visit to 
his barn, captured the pair of blackamoors. ‘This was at the Town 
of Norwich, and was talked of as a supposed freak of ‘‘ melanism,” 
and a few days ago I had the curiosity to walk to the town to inter- 
view the so-called rarities ; when on entering the doorway of the 
room, at one end of which hung a cage containing the birds, the oft- 
repeated and well-known call of the cow-bunting met my ear, for to 
this species the dusky prisoners belong. Possibly they have been 
accustomed previously to cage confinement and had been turned 
out too late to sort with congeners and had taken up with sparrows’ 
society. At any rate, they seem familiar with all the focd and other 
conveniences of a wire cage, and live, thrive and sing as the days 
go by. 
On Sunday, roth of March, the weather was warmer than ever 
and the thermometer got up to 68 in a northern exposure, and on 
this day my neighbor’s bees were seen to return to the hive in the 
evening loaded with pollen. This proves that the skunk cabbage 
has come up and expanded its flowers. This occurrence is eighteen 
days earlier than was the case last year. 
One of my neighbors was somewhat puzzled on finding about 
ten days ago a forked fragment of the thick rhizoma of the water or 
pond lily (perhaps Wuphor Advena) stranded on a piece of lowland 
near the border of a creek that runs through his farm. I have been 
to look at the strange, odd-looking piece of vegetation, and it seems 
not a bad imitation of a young alligator thirty or thirty-five inches 
long, having a very scaly appearance. The man said that had the 
fragment moved when he first saw it he would certainly have ran 
away or started for his gun. I have years ago heard of saurian or 
chedonion monsters being observed in beaver meadows by children 
who mistook these large roots as they undulated in the swollen 
streams for reptiles of the above-named tribes. 
