THE TROLLS OF THE TREES 
Dear little feathered friend of mine, 
Into my very life you twine, | 
Your lesson of courage, your songs of cheer ; 
And anxiously wait I every year 
For your sure return; and I know there will ye 
A nest and a song in a dear home tree. — | 
—Nina Moore 
Of all the winged animals in vee will any other 
give on observer more satisfaction than that which will 
come from studying the bewildering ways and teasing half- — 
understandings, of the different kinds of wrens which have — 
made his locality their home? They are so provokingly 
attractive, so unexpectedly apparent, that a bird student 
never knows where he will hear the friendly call—in the city 
or country, in a valley or on a mountain side—which will 
mean that a wren is willing to make his acquaintance. _ 
The greeting may come out of a tangled heap of 
branches, or the rafters of a shed in a city back yard; from — 
a thicket of wild rose bushes beside a park path ; or [rom 
a mossy bank, where a wren is taking a bath in a hidden 
spring that gurgles out from the bosom of the brown earth. 
A wren may hail you from the upturned roots of a forest 
monarch near the limit of trees on Mount Rainier, or from _ 
a hole in the attic of your nearest neighbor. Their song — 
has been heard as a part of the music of a wedding march _ 
when a marriage ceremony was celebrated on a porch near 
a lake. Once it was a message of hope as it accompanied 
- the dirge of the falling clods of earth which were covering’ 
up a loved being in a “God’s Acre.” 
Usually, wrens seem to want to live near the eniliies 
where man makes his home, although they are not depend- 
ent upon him for their living. Even in the platted places 
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