during the nesting season or in giving 

 an adequate idea of the effect produced 

 upon the senses by his exquisitely beauti- 

 ful nocturnes. One March night some 

 noise just outside my window awakened 

 me. I arose and raising the window 

 listened. The full moon, almost in the 

 zenith, was flooding the landscape with 

 a weird, soft light; the shadows of the 

 cedar hedge a few yards away lay black 



as ink ; the very air was heavy with the 

 perfume of the jessamine abloom in a 

 neighboring forest. In the cedars a mock- 

 ing bird sang to himself a sweet, dreamy 

 song, giving more complete expression 

 to the mystery, the romance, the passion, 

 the rapturous content of a Southern 

 moonlit night than any poem that poet's 

 hand has ever written. 



James Stephen Compton. 



ANTICS OF A HUMMINGBIRD. 



As the writer was standing one May 

 morning near a clump of bushes in the 

 suburbs of a city in Maine he witnessed, 

 for the first time in a long experience of 

 bird study, the courting antics of a male 

 hummingbird. Two of the tiny creatures 

 appeared, apparently evolved from mid- 

 air, and one alighted in the bush. She 

 was the female. The male immediately 

 began to disport himself in the air in the 

 following remarkable manner : 



He dashed back and forth over the 

 head of the female in long, curving 

 swoops such as one describes in a swing, 

 all the time giving utterance to a low, 

 pleasing twitter. He thus swept back 

 and forth ten times, rising at the ends 

 of the curve to a height of perhaps fif- 

 teen feet, sustaining himself there a mo- 

 ment, with his ruby throat flashing in 

 the sun, and then darting down the dou- 

 ble toboggan slide and up to the. other 

 end. Though he flew very swiftly, yet 

 his speed was not the usual flash and 

 his movements could be plainly seen. I 

 had never before seen a hummingbird 

 fly so slowly nor heard from one of them 

 such a prolonged vocal sound. Indeed, 

 it is very rare that one hears the hum- 

 mingbird's voice, even if one is on the 

 alert for it. After the tenth swoop there 

 was a buzz of wings and both birds had 

 vanished. A minute after I found the 

 male in a cherry tree sipping honey from 

 the blossoms. 



There is evidently a rivalry between 

 the bees and the hummingbirds in their 



quest for honey. This bird, with an an- 

 gry dash, expressed its disapproval of 

 the presence of a big bumblebee in the 

 same tree. The usually pugnacious bee 

 incontinently fled, but he did not leave 

 the tree. He dashed back and forth 

 among the branches and white blossoms, 

 the hummingbird in close pursuit. 

 Where will you find another pair 

 that could dodge and turn and 

 dart equal to these? They were 

 like flashes of light, yet the pur- 

 suer followed in the track of the pur- 

 sued, turning when the bee turned. There 

 was no cutting across, for there was no 

 time for that. In short, the bird and the 

 bee controlled the movement of their 

 bodies more quickly and more accurately 

 than the writer could control the move- 

 ment of his eyes. The chase was all over 

 in half the time that it has taken to tell 

 it, but the excitement of a pack of hounds 

 after a fox is as nothing in comparison. 

 The bee escaped, the bird giving up the 

 chase and alighting on a twig. It couldn't 

 have been chasing the bee for food, and 

 there is no possible explanation of its 

 unprovoked attack except that it wished 

 to have all the honey itself. So even as 

 little a body as a hummingbird can show 

 selfishness in a marked degree. How- 

 ever, Mr. Bee continued to take his share 

 of Nature's bounty, though doubtless he 

 had his weather eye open against another 

 attack. Both scenes afforded me a de- 

 liglitful study and were a rare privilege. 

 George Bancroft Griffith. 



188 



