of coats. It was half-past five. The stores were 

 closing, their clerks everywhere eddying into 

 the noisy streams of wheels and hoofs still pour- 

 ing up and down. The traffic tide had turned, 

 but had not yet ebbed away. 



And this was evening ! the coming night ! I 

 moved along with the crowd, homesick for the 

 wideness and quiet of the country, for the sough- 

 ing of the pines, the distant bang of a barn door, 

 the night cry of guineas from some neighboring 

 farm, when, in the hurry and din, I caught the 

 cry of bird voices, and looking up, found that I 

 had stumbled upon a bird roost— at the very 

 heart of the city ! I was in front of King's 

 Chapel Burial Ground, whose half-dozen leafless 

 trees were alive with noisy sparrows. 



The crowd swept on. I halted behind a waste- 

 barrel by the iron fence and forgot the soughing 

 pines and clacking guineas. 



Bird roosts of this size are no common find. 

 I remember a huge fireplace chimney that stood 

 near my home, into which a cloud of swallows 

 used to swarm for a few nights preceding the 

 fall migration ; I lived some years close to the 

 pines at the head of Cubby Hollow, where great 

 [94] 



