The Lay of the Band 
the pig? Yesterday I saw several of her brood along 
the meadow fence hawking for flies. They were not 
far from my cabbage patch. 
I hope that a pair of them returns to me another 
spring, and that they come early. Any bird that 
deigns to dwell under roof of mine commands my 
friendship; but no other bird takes phoebe’s place in 
my affections, there is so much in him to like and 
he speaks for so much of the friendship of nature. 
“Humble and inoffensive bird”’ he has been called 
by one of our leading ornithologies — because he 
comes to my pig-pen! “ Inoffensive”? this bird with 
the cabbage butterfly in his beak? The faint and 
damning praise! And “humble”? There is not a 
humble feather on his body. Humble to those who 
see the pen and not the bird. But to me — why, the 
bird has made a palace of my pig-pen. 
The very pig seems less a pig because of this ex- 
quisite association; and the lowly work of feeding 
the creature has been turned by phcebe into an zs- 
thetic course in bird study. 
