TIME AND CHANGE 
its coming and its going mean much to you. And 
it becomes a part of your life when you have taken 
heed of it with interest and affection, when you have 
established associations with it, when it voices the 
spring or the summer to you, when it calls up the 
spirit of the woods or the fields or the shore. When 
year after year you have heard the veery in the 
beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or 
the wood thrush May after May in the groves where 
you have walked or sat, and the bobolink summer 
after summer in the home meadows, or the vesper 
sparrow in the upland pastures where you have loi- 
tered as a boy or mused as a man, these birds will 
really be woven into the texture of your life. 
What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot 
recall; what a joy they have been to me I know well. 
In a new place, amid strange scenes, theirs are the 
voices and the faces of old friends. In Bermuda the 
bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed 
to make American territory of it. Our birds had 
annexed the island despite the Britishers. 
For many years I have in late April seen the red- 
poll warbler, perhaps for only a single day, flitting 
about as I walked or worked. It is usually my first 
warbler, and my associations with it are very pleas- 
ing. But I really did not know how pleasing until, 
one March day, when I was convalescing from a 
serious illness in one of our sea-coast towns, I 
chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacant lot 
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