for meddling and driving away the Martins. 
That the species fared badly in the neighbor- 
hood of Mount Pleasant, S.C., I have Mr. 
Wayne’s letter of August 5 in evidence. He 
says: “In reference to the Bluebird during the 
past winter, the intense cold weather we ex- 
perienced in South Carolina killed outright an 
enormous quantity of them, as well as Robins, 
Catbirds, and Pine Warblers.”’ 
In another letter he also refers to the few 
breeding birds noticed by him in the neighbor- 
hood of Mount Pleasant. But as my friend 
Deane observes in epistle (August 7, 1895): 
“The most singular feature of the whole thing 
to me is, why should a bird hardy enough to 
follow the melting line of snow from the South 
to the North, and often getting caught in cold 
storms for a week, be the one to get so thor- 
oughly frozen out, more so than most other 
species which we know are less hardy.” 
The temperature at Charleston, 5. C., at one 
time registered as low as eight degrees above 
zero, so Mr, Wayne informs me. 
But in this connection, now that we know 
that numbers must have passed the winter suc- 
cessfully, the following from Mr. Widmann 
may be of interest. His letter dated August 13, 
1895: “On my trip from Cape Girardeau to 
the Current River, and Black River to Poplar 
Bluff (Missouri points), I was somewhat sur- 
prised to find Bluebirds were more numerous 
than Ihad expected. It is possible that the Blue- 
birds had a better chance to pass the ‘ glacial 
period’ successfully in those regions where the 
hillsides are often covered with the refuse left 
by the lumberman. On these sunny hillsides 
snow and ice must have yielded to the sun 
much earlier than in the lowlands, and under 
the decaying logs the bird is sure to find insects 
in spite of snow, and rain, and ice.’’ In the 
same letter the cheerful information is also im- 
parted that a troop of two dozen was seen by 
Mr. Widmann near his home at Old Orchard 
on August 10. 
But in getting back to Northeast Illinois again 
we find that the summer and fall records for 
Glen Ellyn afford a little more encouragement, 
thus showing that some few more pairs had also 
escaped the frigid spell, and had succeeded in 
bringing out their broods somewhere in the 
country to the north of us. 
On August rr the writer saw a flock of four, 
and on the 13th a troop of twelve, all in female 
dress, and at the same stand. None were seen 
again until the 26th of the month, when a flock 
of five was noticed flying southwest over the 
village at 7:30 A. M., and September 25 one 
calling. 
Mr. George K. Cherrie, of the Field Colum- 
bian Museum, Chicago, also informed me that 
THE. NIDOLOGIST 85 
he found Bluebirds more or less plentiful, in 
juvenile dress, while on a visit to his home 
near Des Moines, Ia., in August last. But the 
phenomenally low temperature experienced in 
the Southern States last winter also had a 
marked effect on other species as well—forms 
less conspicuous to the casual observer—for 
instance, the Hermit Thrush, Winter Wren, 
and Myrtle Warbler, the two last entirely falling 
short of recognition, being not recorded at all 
by the writer at Glen Ellyn during the spring 
of 1895. BrNJAMIN T. GAULT. 
Glen Ellyn, Ill., March 4, 1896. 
OO 
The Photo Fiend. 
BY P. B. PEABODY. 
HE universal American habit of exagger- 
ation finds an apt illustration in the cur- 
rent semihumorous use of the word 
“fiend.” 
The fiend is no longer a pandemoniac—never 
safe unless loaded with chains and guarded 
by ponderous doors; but simply a harmless, ec- 
centric creature whose permanent, or even tem- 
porary, turn of mind makes him, in a measure, 
ridiculous to that great world whose infinites- 
imal units, are, of course, entirely sane. A 
fiend with an epithet adds a degree of sanity 
to his craze. We may define the Photo Fiend, 
then, as one who pursues the art of photography 
with just enough of reasonableness in his ardor 
to make the results of his labors mildly inter- 
esting or amusing to the great multitude that 
are more sane than he. In process of time, the 
Photo Fiend will, if he have sufficient sense of 
humor, emerge into the domain of the amateur 
photographer. Having passed thus from the 
state of the “larval fiend” to that of the pupal 
amateur, there is at least a faint chance that he 
may, after much vicissitude, become that splen- 
did imago, a real artist—not a professional one, 
of course, or of necessity; but so much the 
better an artist, perhaps, for that. 
In my ardent pursuit of the photographic art 
I have grown to feel, at times, . . . “a tremor, 
fierce and strange,” that warns me of the pos- 
sibility of my becoming, some time, an amateur. 
And [ have determined that, before I leave 
this larval state, I will record a number of things 
concerning which the photographic manuals 
are learnedly silent, but which the beginner in 
photography absolutely needs to know if he 
would escape vexations and costly disappoint- 
ments. The world would never grow wiser 
were all men too proud to register their mis- 
takes; and the way of life would never grow 
the easier were they that climb too selfish or too 
