24 Proceedings of the Neivport Natural History Society. 
One day, from my window, I had a glimpse of their 
wooing. She was upon the lawn, hopping about, intent 
only, to all appearances, upon getting food. With wings 
outspread, he circled about her, unnoticed apparently, ex¬ 
cept that occasionally, with sudden rush, she would vigo¬ 
rously peck at him, after the manner made so familiar by 
the marital quarrels of the English sparrows in our streets. 
At length, however, he started up and, poised just above 
her, fluttering as if in frenzy, he poured out a song, the 
longest and sweetest I ever heard from one of his kind. 
In the bright sunlight his gloriously handsome crimson body 
was a delight to the eye. Whether she had the heart to 
resist an appeal of love from such a vision of beauty I do 
not know, for they flew away, and I saw and heard no 
more of that bit of romance in feathered life. 
It is pretty generally accepted in these days that physical 
life, in its present condition, is the resultant of purely 
selfish conflicts for existence, continued through ages, in 
which altruism had no place, and in which the fittest (mean¬ 
ing the most powerful) alone survived. In such conflict, 
however, no doubt agility and intelligence often triumphed 
over mere size and strength. Almost every one has seen 
a crow pursued by a king-bird, and has noticed that the 
former never tries to defend himself from his small and 
active enemy, but flies stolidly forward until he can find 
protection in some tree or thicket. Indeed, the crow to 
me has always seemed to be a rather dull, clumsy and un¬ 
interesting fellow. 
There was a commotion among the crows one morning 
last summer at Tiverton. A large flock of them was flying 
about just above the tops of the trees at one particular 
point, and as each individual crow appeared to be cawing 
to the utmost of his ability the result was a large, though 
not very harmonious, chorus. There was evidently a dis¬ 
turbing element present, which upon closer inspection I 
discovered to be two hawks of some kind, which were 
slowly and gracefully circling around just above them. 
Presently, to my surprise, I observed that the crows were 
