OUR FRIENDS, THE BIRDS. 13 
‘You call them thieves and pillagers, but know 
They are the winged wardens of your farms, 
Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, 
And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; 
Even the blackest of them all, the crow, 
Renders good service as your man at arms, 
Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, 
And crying havoc on the slug and snail. 
“How can I teach your children gentleness 
And mercy to the weak, and reverence 
For Life, which, in its weakness or excess, 
Is still a gleam of God’s omnipotence ?”’ 
Just before the Christmas vacation Miss Sweet 
said to her pupils: ‘‘Next term, instead of our usual 
miscellaneous morning exercises, I want to spend the 
time in talking and learning about birds, and, as 
Laura was the first one to introduce the subject to us, 
I desire her to prepare a composition on the ‘ Migra- 
tion of Birds,’ to be read when school opens after 
the holidays.” Laura felt quite willing to spend part 
of her vacation in this way, and immediately wrote 
to her aunt, asking all sorts of questions. When 
her aunt read the letter, she exclaimed: “A little 
leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” (If you do not 
know what she meant, and where the quotation comes 
from, get some one to tell you.) In due time Laura 
received the answers to her questions, and meantime 
she had been hunting through all the bird books in 
