lassified at the end, because of their lack of
knowing.

I met this lovable woman on the street the other day, and we walked and
talked together. She had only good in her heart in all she was planning
to do. She had taste for outlines and color, and she was very fair to
look upon. Her dress--"tailor-made," I think the women call it--set off
her perfect figure to advantage, and her hat was a symmetrical
completion of the whole effect. It was a neat, well-proportioned whole,
the woman and her toilet, which I, being a man, of course, cannot
describe. One of her adornments was the head, breast, and wing of a
Baltimore oriole, worn in her hat.

I met this same woman again a day or two ago in another garb not less
charming and artistic. We ate luncheon together, and it made life worth
living to be with a creature so fair and good. In her hat this time was
a touch of the sky when it lies over a great lake. It was the wing of a
bluebird.

I know--or knew--four birds, and to know a fair bird well is almost
equal to knowing a fair woman well, though they have different ways. Two
of these birds that I knew were orioles and two were bluebirds. The two
orioles and the two bluebirds were husbands and wives. I stumbled upon
them all last year. The bluebirds had a nest in a hole in a hard maple
stump in a clearing in St. Clair County, Michigan. The orioles' nest was
well woven in pear shape, dangling from close-swinging twigs at the end
of an elm limb which hung over a creek in Orange County, Indiana. The
male oriole attended faithfully to the wants of his soberer-hued wife
sitting upon the four eggs in their nest. He was gorgeous all over, in
his orange and black, and as faithfully and gallantly as the male
bluebird did he regard his mate, and he was, if possible, even more
jealous and watchful in his unwearied care of her.

They made two very happy and earnest families. Each male, in addition to
caring for his mate, did good in the world for men and women. Each
killed noxious worms and insects for food, and each, in the very
exuberance of the flush year, and of living, gave forth at times such
music that all men, women, and children who listened, though they might
be dull and ignorant, somehow felt better, and were better as well as
happier human beings. But there was death in the air. The male oriole
and the male bluebird had each a brilliant coat!

Young were hatched in each of these two nests--vigorous, clamoring
young, comi