170 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



proclaiming the merits of some quack remedy. Opodeldoc- 

 opodeldoc-t ry-Doctor- Lincoln 's-opodeldoc ! he seemed to re- 

 peat over and over again, with a rapidity that would have 

 distanced the deftest-tongued Figaro that ever rattled. 



15. The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a 

 meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. When they are 

 breeding, if I chance to pass, one of the male birds always 

 accompanies me like a constable, flitting from post to post 

 of the rail-fence, with a short note of reproof continually 

 repeated till I am fairly out of the neighborhood. Then 

 he will swing away into the air and run down the wind, 

 gurgling music without stint over the unheeding tussocks 

 of meadow-grass and dark clumps of bulrushes that mark 

 his domain. We have no bird whose song will match the 

 nightingale's in compass, none whose note is so rich as 

 that of the European blackbird, but for mere rapture I 

 have never heard the bobolink's rival. 



16. A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jut- 

 ting brick in the arched entrance of the ice-house. Al- 

 ways on the same brick, and never more than a single pair, 

 though two broods of five each are raised there every 

 summer. How do they settle their claim to the home- 

 stead ? By what right of primogeniture ? Once the chil- 

 dren of the man employed about the place oalogized the 

 nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two. I felt 

 toward these boys as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner 

 did toward him after he shot the albatross. But the 

 pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his 

 wonted perch, so near my window that I can hear the 

 click of his bill as he snaps at a fly with unerring precision. 



17. The pewee is the first bird to pipe in the morning ; 

 and during the early summer he preludes his matutinal 

 ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle, unheard at any 

 other time. He saddens with the season, and as summer 

 declines he changes his note to cheu, pewee ! as if in lam- 



