B Y THE WA YS1DE 
67 
cooked meat and butter. In the spring 
and summer he likes to pick at fresh 
earth with the little rootlets left in, but 
in winter he gets along with sand. His 
standard food, though, is a kind of bird 
seed, hemp, I think. 
“Mrs. Lord said that the wild robins 
are not at all afraid of the family. They 
seem to know that they are good to Pete 
and so will do no harm to them. .She 
said that one cold morning last spring 
she saw about six robins on the window 
sill outside of the window where Pete’s 
cage hung, and they certainly would have 
come in if she had opened the window 
for them.” 
The power to use the senses to their 
full capacity, clearly, sensitively, pene- 
tratingly, does not come by nature. It 
is the fruit of an attentive habit of 
veracious perception. Such a habit is 
the result of instruction applied to the 
opening of blind eyes and the unsealing 
of deaf ears. The academic studies which 
have most influence in this direction are 
those which deal principally with objec¬ 
tive facts, such as nature-study, language, 
number, drawing and music. 
—Henry Van Dyke. 
At last I fell asleep on the grass and 
awoke with a chorus of birds singing 
around me, squirrels running up the tree, 
and some woodpeckers laughing, and it 
was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever 
I saw; and I did not care one penny how 
any of the birds or beasts had been 
formed. Troin Charles Darwin ’s Tetters to 
His Wife. 
The Louisiana courts have decided 
that the state law prohibiting the use of 
bird feathers for millinery is constitu¬ 
tional. A test case was carried through 
bv the state Audubon society. 
BY THE WAYSIDE 
Published on the tenth of each month except July and 
Angust. 
The official organ of the Wisconsin and Illinois Audu¬ 
bon Societies. 
Twenty-five cents per year. Single Copies 3 cents. 
All communications should be sent to Miss Ruth Mar¬ 
shall, Appleton, Wis. 
An Example of Constancy. 
A pair of phoebe birds built their nest 
under the roof of our front porch on the 
homestead farm. Our coming and going 
did not seem to disturb them in the 
least. They lived there very happily 
until their brood of little ones was 
hatched. One night a cruel cat climbed 
the post, tore down the nest and killed 
both the mother bird and the little ones. 
The small widower was disconsolate, and 
inconsolable and mourned his loved and 
lost family, not only through the re¬ 
mainder of that summer, but during the 
following five summers. For a phoebe 
came each summer alone to the porch 
and would call at intervals during the 
entire season, and we never saw, in all that 
time, a mate. In the spring of the sixth 
year, he returned with a new wife, and 
with much persuasion and coaxing, tried 
to induce her to build the new home in 
the same place. She, evidently shyer 
than his first mate had been, or distrust¬ 
ful of old memories, refused firmly to set¬ 
tle there with him, but built their nest 
and established their new home under 
the eaves of the horse barn, at some little 
distance from the house, where they lived 
in peace and safety s for several years. 
They were there when we left the town. 
Every fall, before leaving for the south, 
Mr. Phoebe with his grown-up family 
would retu-rn to bid farewell to the scene 
of his early jovs and sorrows, and every 
spring, the intervals of waiting for his 
new mate was partly spent in the same 
spot calling his greeting as of yore. 
The above account was told me by a 
lady living on a farm near our citv. 
E. S. G. 
