184 RED-BREASTED THRUSH. 
been frozen up during the winter, are exposed the 
first melting of the snow, full of juice and im high 
flavour; shortly afterwards, when the young require 
them, the parents get plenty of fruit. 
It builds on the branch of a spruce fir-tree, generally 
about five or six feet from the ground, taking no par- 
ticular pains to conceal it, and frequently selecting a 
tree in the immediate vicinity of a house. Its nest is 
formed, like the European Thrush, of grass and moss 
interwoven, and lined with dung. ‘The eggs, five in 
number, are about fourteen lines long, and have a 
bluish green colour like those of the Common Thrush. 
He is one of the loudest and most assiduous songsters, 
his notes rather like those of our Thrush, but not so 
loud. Within the arctic circle the woods are silent in 
the bright light of noonday, but towards midnight, 
when the sun travels near the horizon, and the shades 
of the forest are lengthened, the concert commences, 
and continues till six or seven in the morning. Even 
in these remote regions the mistake of those naturalists 
who have asserted that the feathered tribes of America 
are void of harmony, might be fully disproved. Indeed 
the transition is so sudden from the perfect repose— 
the death-like stillness of an arctic winter—to the 
animated bustle of summer; the trees spread their 
foliage with such magical rapidity, and every succeeding 
morning opens with such agreeable accessions of feath- 
ered songsters to swell the chorus, their plumage as 
gay and unimpaired as when they enlivened the deep 
green forests of tropical climates, that the return of a 
northern spring excites in the mind a deep feeling of 
the beauties of the season, a sense of the bounty and 
Providence of the Supreme Being, which is cheaply 
purchased by the tedium of nine months winter. 
