EDITOR'S PREFACE. 
HIS collection of New England bird-songs was begun 
when the author was in his sixty-seventh year, and 
left. unfinished when, the tenth of May, 1890, he passed 
suddenly away, being two years beyond his threescore 
and ten. It is a record of the pastime of an old lover of 
the birds, of a musician who counted it among his chief 
joys that he had lived thirty summers in a bird-haunted 
grove, — of one to whom the voices of the wood and field 
were as familiar as those of his own family. The inten- 
tion was to write a book for the young people of New 
England, many of whom he had taught the rudiments of 
vocal music. The volume was to be made up of bird- 
songs and observations on the domestic animals, with 
special reference to their several forms of utterance. Some- 
thing was also to be said of the music of inanimate things. 
The thought came too late ; and it remains for the present 
writer — not unacquainted with his father’s work and 
wishes — to gather together such fragments as were to 
be found. 
Brief, imperfect as the record is, it may yet have value 
if, written without apprenticeship in the endeavors of exact 
‘knowledge, it accord here and there with the conclusions 
