74 THE CITY OF THE BIRDS. 



row. Perhaps I had seen him a hundred times 

 before, and carelessly passed him by, thinking 

 him to be our familiar little chippy, which he so 

 much resembles ; but now as he is scolding me so 

 hard, I pause to look him straight in the face with 

 the glass, and find, to my great interest and satis- 

 faction, that he is not the hair bird at all, but his 

 brother; a sparrow, as Mr. Minot truthfully says, 

 not so well known as he deserves to be. Now 

 that I have been introduced to him I can readily 

 discern the characteristic differences which the 

 scientific classifier has pointed out. He has no 

 clearly-defined light lines about his chestnut 

 crown, he lacks the black forehead and eye stripe, 

 his bill is reddish brown, not black, as is that of 

 the chippy, while his tail is longer, not having 

 such a deep notch at the end. Besides these 

 special dissimilarities, there are certain peculiari- 

 ties of habit and temper, a sonictliing in his 

 actions, easily seen, but difficult to describe, that 

 distinguishes him from his near relation. 



Chippy always, I believe, builds either in the 

 shrubs or on the lower branches of the trees, but 

 his brother often chooses a building site on the 

 ground, under a juniper, or in some low bush. 

 Chippy's eggs are bright bluish green, thickly 

 scrawled and dotted with dark purple, while the 

 field-sparrow's are smaller, grayish white and 

 sparsely marked with brown blotches. 



