48 Twelve Months With 



For the toilers have the least, 

 While the idlers lord the feast. 

 Yes, our workers they are bound. 

 Pallid captives to the ground; 

 Jeered by traitors, fooled by knaves, 

 Till they stumble into graves. 



How appears to tiny eyes 

 All this wisdom of the wise?" 



At least it becomes us not to magnify unduly 

 our ov^^n importance in the universe, and greedily 

 accept all the beautiful things of nature as our 

 rightful due, created expressly for our ovpn par- 

 ticular use or pleasure, without at least show^ing 

 our appreciation and giving thanks! If we had 

 brought as much joy and beauty and harmony 

 into the world as the birds, we might then be 

 justified in claiming kinship with them, as Lowell 

 did when he recalled his untainted boyhood as the 

 time "when birds and flowers and I were happy 

 peers." 



In this latitude the month of May is the very 

 height of the nesting and migration season. Per- 

 haps more birds nest with us in May than in any 

 other month of the year, and practically all of the 

 spring migration takes place between the fifteenth 

 of April and the first of June. 



Our regular May birds, it seems, will not come 

 in April, no matter how favorable the weather 

 may be. I have often looked for some of the 

 usual May arrivals in April, because of early 



