58 
BY THE WAYSIDE 
fore daybreak. He kept saving it over and 
over from a thicket that edged a field in front 
of the house, and it certainly was a scene of 
witchery as the dawn slowly crept over the 
hills and the stars went out one by one as the 
soft light stole across the sky. But I don’t 
suppose he was thinking of the dawn at all, but 
was probably eating his breakfast down there 
in the hazel bushes and snatching a worm in 
between each song. 
You will often hear one bird singing all 
alone this way in the early morning, but wait 
a little and the whole chorus will soon begin, 
and then there is such' a rush and tumble of 
bird notes that you can hardly tell one from 
the other. 
We do not often have English sparrows 
where I live, but sometimes these noisy fel¬ 
lows intrude into our quiet, woods and then 
their squaking is a prominent feature of the 
morning chorus. I heard one at 4:15 one morn¬ 
ing chirping with a persistance worthy of a 
better cause. He went on and on and I fin¬ 
ally began to count the chirps. When I had 
counted up to 1121 I gave it up and went to 
sleep. I woke at 6:15 and the same bird was 
still holding forth. I counted 360 consecutive 
squacks and then concluded to get up and for¬ 
get the fellow. 
One wild, stormy night, when the waves 
were roaring up and down our shore I heard 
the piercing “peep-peep” of a sand-piper up 
there in the dark sky. 
On still nights I often hear the “honk-honk” 
of wild geese flying over Lake Michigan. How 
do they know which way to fly, I wonder! 
If you have trees around your house go out¬ 
side some warm summer night in May or 
June and you will hear occasional sleeply 
little peeps and twitters, and then you will 
realize that there are numbers of tiny birds 
up there in the dark leaves, dreaming just 
as you do in your sleep. 
I often wish that in early summer every¬ 
body would go to bed at 8 o’clock and get 
up at four, and then we would not have to 
miss any of the interesting things that are 
going on out in the woods and fields. 
Ellen D. Farwell. 
A BIRD GAME. 
I heard of a very nice party given by some 
members of the Audubon society where a gues¬ 
sing game was played that T shall try de¬ 
scribe to you. Each child was given a card 
with pictures on it to suggest the name of 
a bird. One card had a patch of blue color, 
and a drawing or outline of a bird; this was 
the blue bird. A picture of a nut and an in¬ 
cubator with chickens just coming out, pasted 
on one card meant nuthatch. The robin was 
represented by the picture of a boy with the 
name Rob, and an inn; and so on. 
The cards were passed around and the child¬ 
ren tried to see which could guess the most 
names of birds from the cards. 
There were 12 children and 12 cards. The 
hostess suggested that this made one bird for 
each month in the year. They might call the 
blue bird April’s bird. She asked how many 
children have birthdays in April? Wouldn’t 
it be nice for these to take the blue bird for 
their birthday bird and watch it and learn all 
they could about it during the next year? 
She went through the list until she had 
found the birthday of each child . 
The hostess then said that a fairy bird 
had flown to her shoulder and whispered to 
her a fairy message, and that though there 
might be a mistake about there being a fairy 
bird there was no mistake about the message; 
and the message was that the children were to 
hunt over the rooms for some surprises that 
were hidden around them. The found nests 
made of evergreen and filled with candy eggs. 
And then the children all went home with 
their little nests and a copy of “Bird’s Peti¬ 
tion” written out for each one, and tied with 
ribbons. 
I have heard, too, of Easter nests made of lit¬ 
tle cakes scooped out, frosted and filled with 
candy eggs. 
Will you show this to your teacher and 
ask her if she won’t get up some game like 
this for you? E. E. H. 
«/ • 
A Dakota Racer. 
Our neighbor at the hotel was a gentleman 
from the country, big, robust, of aldermanic 
build, and a curious mixture of Yankee 
shrewdness and Irish wit. He had prospered 
in this world’s goods and had seen a bit of 
the world. His manners and his morals were 
not above reproach, but the instincts of a 
naturalist and a sportsman he had, and these 
quite won our hearts. 
“Talk about them coaching meets I see when 
I was in Los Angeles last winter, why I could 
show them California fellers some sport that 
