The Missing Cootf 
hurried and flustered at sight of me, and nearing 
the end of a high branch was in the act of springing, 
when the dead tip cracked under him and he came 
tumbling headlong. The height must have been 
forty feet, so that before he reached the ground he 
had righted himself,— his tail out and legs spread, 
— but the fall was too great. He hit the earth with 
a dull thud, and before I could reach him lay dead 
upon the needles, with blood oozing from his eyes 
and nostrils. 
Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things 
suffer as we hardly yet understand. No one can esti- 
mate the deaths of a year from severe cold, heavy 
storms, high winds and tides, I have known the nests 
of a whole colony of gulls and terns to be swept away 
in a great storm; and I have seen the tides, over 
and over, flood the inlet marshes, and drown out 
the nests in the grass, —those of the clapper-rails 
by thousands. 
I remember a late spring storm that came with 
the returning redstarts and, in my neighborhood, 
killed many of them. Toward evening of that day 
one of the little black and orange voyageurs flut- 
tered against the window and we let him in, wet, 
Jol 
