ending the chat disappeared from the little park;
but a week later I came upon him, or his voice, in a private and rarely
visited pasture down the road, where many clumps of small trees and much
low growth offered desirable nesting-places. He made his usual protest,
and feeling that I had been the cause of the tragedy of the first nest,
though I had grieved over it as much as the owners could, the least I
could do, to show my regret, was to take myself and my curiosity out of
his neighborhood. So I retired at once, and left the whole broad pasture
to the incorrigible chat family, who, I hope, succeeded at last in
enriching the world by half a dozen more of their bewitching kind.

V.

A FEAST OF FLOWERS.

When first the crocus thrusts its point of gold
Up through the still snow-drifted garden mould,
And folded green things in dim woods unclose
Their crinkled spears, a sudden tremor goes
Into my veins and makes me kith and kin
To every wild-born thing that thrills and blows.

T. B. ALDRICH.

My feast of flowers began before I entered Colorado. For half the
breadth of Kansas the banks of the railroad were heavenly blue with
clustered blossoms of the spiderwort. I remember clumps of this flower
in my grandmother's old-fashioned garden, but my wildest dreams never
pictured miles of it, so profuse that, looking backward from the train,
the track looked like threads of steel in a broad ribbon of blue.

Through the same State, also, the Western meadow-larks kept us company,
and I shall never again think of "bleeding Kansas," but of smiling
Kansas, the home of the bluest of blossoms and the sweetest of singers.
The latter half of the way through the smiling State was golden with
yellow daisies in equal abundance, and beside them many other flowers.
Beginning at noon, I counted twenty-seven varieties, so near the track
that I could distinguish them as we rushed past.

The Santa Fe road enters Colorado in a peculiarly desolate region.
Flowers and birds appear to have stayed behind in Kansas, and no green
thing shows its head, excepting one dismal-looking bush, which serves
only to accentuate the poverty of the soil. As we go on, the mud is
replaced by sand and stones, from gravel up to big bowlders, and flowers
begin to struggle up through the unpromising ground.

Nothing is more surprising than the amazing profusion of wild-flowers
which this apparently ungenial soil produces. Of a certainty, if
Colorad