20 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
some seventeen years ago, when I was laboriously 
learning the birds. I was walking through a bit of 
waste-land encircled by trolley-tracks when I heard 
this same song. It was like nothing which I had 
ever heard in New England, where I had learned 
what little I knew about birds, and I searched every- 
where for the singer, expecting to see a bird about 
the size of a robin. 
Finally, in the underbrush just ahead of me, I 
saw an unmistakable wren singing so ecstatically that 
he shook and trembled all over with the outpouring 
of his song. It was my first sight and hearing of 
this southern bird, the Carolina wren, the largest of 
our five wrens, whose field-mark is a long white 
line over the eye. He is reddish-brown, while the 
house wren, which is half an inch shorter, is cinna- 
mon-brown. The long-billed marsh wren also has a 
white line over the eye and is about the same size, 
but is never found away from the tall grass bordering 
on water, and has no such song as the Carolina. 
The winter wren and the short-billed marsh wren 
could neither of them be mistaken for the Carolina, 
as both are about an inch and a half shorter and 
lack the white line. The house wren and the long- 
billed marsh wren bubble when they sing, the Caro- 
lina wren and the winter wren ring, and the short- 
billed marsh wren, the rarest of all, clicks. Of them 
all only the Carolina wren sings in the winter. 
That day the wren-song brought me good luck. 
It was no more than finished when I heard someone 
passing along a nearby wood-road, who turned out 
