AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 55 



save the hawks and eagles far out of hearing distance, when^suddenly 

 floated up from 1 beneath us the first note of the Hermit's song, and for 

 some time we were favored with as fine a display of his vocal powers 

 as I have heard. 



My next meeting with this meistersinger among birds was in a scene 

 far different from these and strangely incongruous. In smoky Chicago 

 I occupied a tiny room in a boarding house on Dearborn avenue; 

 scarcely a mile from the busy center of the city, and not a hundred 

 yards from a rattling cable line. My window looked out on a diminu- 

 tive back yard, to which a solitary tree gave some appearance of life 

 and verdure. On a morning in April I was drowsing away the early 

 hours, uncertain whether to wake up and begin the day or to fall 

 asleep again; when I was startled to wide wakefulness by a rich, clear 

 note which seemed to come from my little yard. Could I mistake even 

 that short fragment of the song? Yet how impossible that a Hermit 

 Thrush should be there at all, to say nothing of his singing at such a 

 time and in such a place. I obeyed my first impulse, which was to 

 jump out of bed and run to the window, and there, sure enough, 

 was a solitary Hermit. 



It was a long cold spring, many of the birds that breed farther north 

 long overstaying their usual time, and I had an opportunity to see 

 several Hermit Thrushes in the parks and in the woody suburbs, but 

 not once again did I hear so much as a call note from one of them, 

 they all passed noiselessly from bush to bush, biding their time until 

 they could give full voice to their joy in living, in their beloved 

 northern forests. 



Freeman Foster Burr. 



