DELAWARE VALLEY ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 31 



ular intervals above tall scrub, the fire had run along the ground, 

 but seldom eating its way up the trunks. All the leaves on the 

 scrub, here largely oak and chestnut and sassafras and fire 

 cherry, were scorched brown by the heat of the fire in the fallen 

 leaves and light mould below. A number of old trees, some, 

 perhaps, of the original forest cut for tan-bark years ago, were 

 revealed by the burning. These were still smoking, the long 

 drought having made them, rotten from long lying as many of 

 them were, fit fuel for the fire where it had once gained a good 

 headway. Among these fallen trees pine stumps burned with a 

 clear flame, eating holes down into the ground along their roots 

 sometimes to the depth of two feet. 



There was no great heat as I walked through the smoking 

 brush, except where I passed such a glowing pine stump near 

 the road, which, fortunately, was seldom burnt over, its many 

 rocks and its wiry and still green grasses having in most places 

 resisted the flames. It was none the less surprising to me, 

 however, though I had come upon little oases of greenery in the 

 charred woods, to hear as I followed the road deeper into the 

 desolation, a good deal of bird-song. It was a gray morning 

 with presage of rain, such a morning as often, even as late as 

 early August, wakes the spring again in the birds, calls back 

 their April instincts, but still I had not expected bird-song now 

 on these barrens, which had known but one rain in six weeks 

 and that but a six hours' rain, and after a fire had just passed 

 through. I had walked but within the burned belt, however, 

 when I heard a Chewink, who from the top of a ten-foot dead 

 stick, sang as vigorously as if he were just mated, though 

 around him arose the smoke of a hundred lingering little fires. 

 More remarkable still was the fact that now, when I was well 

 toward the mid-most of the path of the fire, the singing of 

 Chewinks came to me from all directions. About every hun- 

 dred yards along the road 1 would pass a Chewink sending out 

 bravely his little tinkling song over the burnt brush and 

 smouldering pine stumps. Just beyond my first Chewink I 

 had come upon a Field Sparrow singing, and now all along the 

 two miles of burnt road on the mountaintop other of his kind 

 were about, feeding young, some of them, with what I hardly 



