hater UUs BOON (BiUsL EXTOL N 9 
taxes from which an owner may become exempt by clearing his land of 
everything except rubble. They cross The Prairie sometimes, not too far 
from the corner, to save a few steps; but only a few venturesome ones 
from among the seven- and eight-year-olds work their way through the 
miniature jungle formed by giant ragweed, burdock, thistles and other 
weeds that scratch one’s legs and hands or stick to one’s clothing. No one 
looks here for edible herbs, perhaps because the stunted stray dandelion, 
which might be pretty, is trampled in the few square inches which it 
requires for existence at the margin. The adventurers, however, have found 
berries. They have eaten them, too; but they, and their mothers and the 
doctor, subsequently had a very bad half hour. As it happened, the chil- 
dren found the fruit of the jimson weed. 
Sparrow? A puzzled frown and a shake of the head that meant ‘“‘never 
heard of it” was the answer to my query about the noisy little pests that 
quarreled nearly all the year around above our windows. Somewhat later, 
when a big white bird flew high above us on his easy way toward the gray 
river nearby or the harbor beyond, where the water begins to be blue, a 
boy announced authoritatively, ‘‘That’s a seegle!” But then he had had 
the advantages of a vacation in a Waukegan camp. There was scarcely 
more than a trace of interest when I asked the children to listen to the 
swifts twittering from afar. Perhaps I supplanted That-funny-lady-that- 
likes-things-like-that whom some of the children seemed to know, or That- 
old-man-that’s-got-a-garden; but the time came when someone brought 
me a dead oven-bird which possibly had come to grief because of a telegraph 
wire. There was the day a black-eyed three-year-old carried about by the 
head a brown thrasher which some grown-up had snatched up for him as 
its eyes were filming, and which he refused to give up until it dropped 
unheeded from his hand, and he was searching once more in the rubbish 
heaps. The children fell into the way of bringing me birds in the spring. 
But the birds were dead, and I could never be certain that the children 
had only “found” them. 
Had anyone else seen the thrush which I saw for a bleak moment 
wildly flying about the rusty and dangling rain pipes of an old black 
house, it would probably have been brought to me clutched in a grimy 
hand, its wings still quivering perhaps, but its eyes glazing. Had the 
adventurous eight-year-olds come upon the vesper sparrow which I saw in 
The Prairie, had they been able to run down the little transient that 
seemed, like the children of the vicinity, to have been stranded there by 
an accident of migration, it would not have been left there for me to find. 
The sparrows above our windows at best do not matter to anybody. Few 
note the “seegles”. Fewer see the swifts. There was a time when nobody 
noticed whether or not there was a bird of any kind. And nobody seemed 
to care. 
Here, the children are not used to birds. They are likely, oftener than 
not, to grin amusedly when they speak of That-old-man-that’s-got-a-garden ; 
but there are school picnics, nowadays, and settlement-house vacations, and 
bird classes and bird walks (Good morning, Audubon!) under the trees 
and along the streams of parks and woods. The dime stores display a 
