20 WAKE-ROBIN 
sess attractions for all comers. Here one may study 
almost the entire ornithology of the State. It is 
a rocky piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now 
fast relapsing into the wildness and freedom of 
nature, and marked by those half-cultivated, half- 
wild features which birds and boys love. It is 
bounded on two sides by the village and highway, 
crossed at various points by carriage-roads, and 
threaded in all directions by paths and byways, 
along which soldiers, laborers, and truant. school- 
boys are passing at all hours of the day. It is so 
far escaping from the axe and the bush-hook as to 
have opened communication with the forest and 
mountain beyond by straggling lines of cedar, laurel, 
and blackberry. The ground is mainly occupied 
with cedar and chestnut, with an undergrowth, in 
many places, of heath and bramble. The chief 
feature, however, is a dense growth in the centre, 
consisting of dogwood, water-beech, swamp-ash, 
alder, spice-bush, hazel, etc., with a network of 
smilax and frost-grape. A little zigzag stream, the 
draining of a swamp beyond, which passes through 
this tanglewood, accounts for many of its features 
and productions, if not for its entire existence. 
Birds that are not attracted by the heath, or the 
cedar and chestnut, are sure to find some excuse for 
visiting this miscellaneous growth in the centre. 
Most of the common birds literally throng this idle- 
wild; and I have met here many of the rarer spe- 
cies, such as the great-crested flycatcher, the soli- 
tary warbler, the blue-winged swamp warbler, the 
