es, and faced the woodpecker, calm, but prepared to stand up for
his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his breakfast. Sometimes
they had a little set-to, with beaks not more than three inches apart,
the woodpecker making feints of rushing upon his _vis-a-vis_, and the
cardinal jumping up ready to clinch, if a fight became necessary. It
never went quite so far as that, though they glared at each other, and
the cardinal uttered a little whispered "ha!" every time he sprang up.

The Virginian's deliberate manner of eating made peace important to him.
He took a grain of hard corn in his mouth, lengthwise; then working his
sharp-edged beak, he soon succeeded in cutting the shell of the kernel
through its whole length. From this he went on turning it with his
tongue, and still cutting with his beak, till the whole shell rolled out
of the side of his mouth in one long piece, completely cleared from its
savory contents.

The red-head, on the contrary, took his grain of corn to a branch, or
sometimes to the trunk of a tree, where he sought a suitable crevice in
the bark or in a crotch, placed his kernel, hammered it well in till
firm and safe, and then proceeded to pick off pieces and eat them
daintily, one by one. Sometimes he left a kernel there, and I saw how
firmly it was wedged in, when the English sparrow discovered his store,
fell upon it, and dug it out. It was a good deal of work for a
strong-billed, persistent sparrow to dislodge a grain thus placed. But
of course he never gave up till he could carry it off, probably because
he saw that some one valued it; for since he was unable to crack a grain
that was whole, it must have been useless to him. Sometimes the
woodpecker wedged the kernel into a crevice in the bark of the trunk,
then broke it up, and packed the pieces away in other niches; and I have
seen an English sparrow go carefully over the trunk, picking out and
eating these tidbits. That, or something else, has taught sparrows to
climb tree trunks, which they do, in the neighborhood I speak of, with
as much ease as a woodpecker. I have repeatedly seen them go the whole
length of a tall elm trunk; proceeding by little hops, aided by the
wings, and using the tail for support almost as handily as a woodpecker
himself.

The red-head's assumption of being monarch of all he surveyed did not
end with the breakfast-table; he seemed to consider himself guardian and
protector of the whole place. One evening I wa