Mar., 1919 OLIVE THORNE MILLER 71 
In the summer of 1891, Mrs. Miller, at my solicitation, went up to Locust 
Grove, New York, to study the Hermit Thrush on his breeding grounds in my 
home woods. Board was secured for her in the only farmhouse near the 
woods, but when I found her in her cramped bare white-washed room with her 
box of books standing in the middle of the floor because there was no other 
place for it, I was filled with misgivings, not lessened by the memory of the 
luncheon in a fashionable New York woman’s club to which she had taken me 
a few weeks before. I soon knew her better, however. With a table for her 
books and her indispensable rocking chair to write in, she became enthusiastic 
about her room, for through a closed blind she could watch the unsuspecting 
birds promenading up and down the fence and feeding in the bushes outside. 
Her books surprised me. They were all either on birds or nature, ranging from 
‘Coues’ Key and the latest good bird books—she said she would like to have a 
new one every week—to the nature poems of Emerson, Sill, and Sidney Lanier. 
Twenty-four years later she wrote ‘‘That summer at your old home is a lasting 
source of pleasant memories to me. J can recall the road through that delight- 
ful woods almost foot by foot with charming details all the way, from the 
Thrushes’ nest near the entrance to the Cuckoo’s nest near the exit, and all 
the delights between.’ To me the summer, as the one spent with her in Utah 
in 1892, is rich in cherished memories, for Mrs. Miller was the most delightful 
of field companions. No beauty of forest or meadow, sky, cloud, or mountain 
escaped her, and she loved birds as she did nature. When, fresh from college, 
I saw her first, her hair was nearly white, but the discrepancy in our ages 
never seemed to occur to me, for she had the spirit and enthusiasm of youth, 
and we worked side by side as sisters. 
The familiar question, how did she come to be Heese in birds, is easily 
answered superficially, though no one can say how much neq pansies the old 
revolutionary Mann ancestor of Bunker Hill fame had in the bend of the twig. 
While her first bird book was not written until 1885, as a mother of four chil- 
dren she had learned the educational value of true stories and especially of. na- 
ture tales and had previously published several juvenile books dealing with 
birds and animals—Little Folks in Feathers and Fur being perhaps one of the 
best known. Then, her children being grown, and her time at her disposal, a 
fortuitous circumstance gave a new angle to her nature interest. An old friend 
from Chicago, the twenty-year home of her married life, Mrs. Sara Hubbard, 
a pioneer bird worker, came to visit her in her Brooklyn home, and together 
they went to Prospect Park, then as now rich in birds, and she caught the en- 
thusiasm which lasted throughout her remaining years, inducing her to lecture, 
and to give bird classes as well as to write a half shelf full of bird books. 
In her field work, special birds had a peculiar attraction for her, among 
them the Solitaire and the Phainopepla. ‘‘How I envy you the music of the 
Solitaire !’’ she wrote me in answer to a letter from its breeding grounds. ‘‘It 
is the most wonderful song in the world, I think.’’ And when after visiting 
her married son in California, she was about returning to Brooklyn, she wrote 
that if she could find the Solitaire in Colorado she would give up her overland 
ticket and perhaps spend the rest of the summer studying him. 
The Phainopepla was the burden of her song for years, associated as it 
was with her thoughts of California, which was her Mecea long before she was 
able to make it her home. ‘‘TI am suffering from my old malady, California 
fever,’’ she wrote me. And from Bailey Island, Maine, in 1902—‘‘You see I 
