Brown, Olive or Grayish Brown, and Brown and Gray Sparrowy Birds 
gled underbrush of the deep, cool woods. His presence there is 
far more likely to be detected by the ear than the eye. 
Throughout the nesting season music fairly pours from his 
tiny throat; it bubbles up like champagne; it gushes forth in a 
lyrical torrent and overflows into every nook of the forest, that 
seems entirely pervaded by his song. While music is every- 
where, it apparently comes from no particular point, and, search 
as you may, the tiny singer still eludes, exasperates, and yet 
entrances. 
If by accident you discover him balancing on a swaying 
twig, never far from the ground, with his comical little tail erect, 
or more likely pointing towards his head, what a pert, saucy 
minstrel he is ! You are lost in amazement that so much music 
could come from a throat so tiny. 
Comparatively few of his admirers, however, hear the exqui- 
site notes of this little brown wood-sprite, for after the nest- 
ing season is over he finds little to call them forth during the 
bleak, snowy winter months, when in the Middle and Southern 
States he may properly be called a neighbor. Sharp hunger, 
rather than natural boldness, drives him near the homes of men, 
where he appears just as the house wren departs for the South. 
With a forced confidence in man that is almost pathetic in a bird 
that loves the forest as he does, he picks up whatever lies about 
the house or barn in the shape of food — crumbs from the kitchen 
door, a morsel from the dog’s plate, a little seed in the barn-yard, 
happily rewarded if he can find a spider lurking in some sheltered 
place to give a flavor to the unrelished grain. Now he becomes 
almost tame, but we feel it is only because he must be. 
The spot that decided preference leads him to, either win- 
ter or summer, is beside a bubbling spring. In the moss 
that grows near it the nest is placed in early summer, nearly 
always roofed over and entered from the side, in true wren-fash- 
ion ; and as the young fledglings emerge from the creamy-white 
eggs, almost the first lesson they receive from their devoted little 
parents is in the fine art of bathing. Even in winter weather, 
when the wren has to stand on a rim of ice, he will duck and 
splash his diminutive body. It is recorded of a certain little 
individual that he was wont to dive through the icy water on a 
December day. Evidently the wrens, as a family, are not far 
removed in the evolutionary scale from true water-birds. 
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