NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS 



ers — that come in winter and feed on the suet on 

 the maple in front of my window, how much com- 

 pany they are to me! What thoughts and associa- 

 tions they bring with them! What a pleasure to 

 have them as my guests on the old tree ! The cold, 

 naked, snow-choked woods — what can those little 

 pilgrims get there? I think the nuthatch touches me 

 the most closely; he is pretty to look upon, and his 

 voice is that of a child, soft, confiding, contented, and 

 his ways are all ways of prettiness — his sliding up 

 and down and round the tree, his pose, with head 

 standing out at right angles to the body, which en- 

 ables him to see the approach of danger as readily 

 as if he were perched on a horizontal limb, his 

 pretty habit of making a vise of a crevice in the bark 

 to hold a nut. All his notes and calls are pleasing; 

 he is incapable of a harsh sound. His call in the 

 spring woods when we made maple sugar in my boy- 

 hood — "yank, yank, yank" — how it comes back 

 to me ! Not a song, but a token — the spirit of the 

 leafless maple-woods finding a voice. 



And now for two or three weeks I have had an- 

 other guest at the free-lunch table, the prettiest 

 of them all, the red-breasted nuthatch from the 

 North, and he so appreciates my bounty that he 

 has taken up his temporary abode here in a wren's 

 box a few yards from the lunch-table. One cold day 

 I saw him go into the box and remain for some time. 

 So at sundown I went and rapped on his retreat, and 

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