d been ten years on the watch.

The song, which has not often been described, is more suggestive of the
Nashville's than of any other, but so decidedly different as never for a
moment to be confounded with it. "When you hear it," a friend had said
to me several years before, "you will know it for something new." It is
long (I speak comparatively, of course), very sprightly, and peculiarly
staccato, and is made up of two parts, the second quicker in movement
and higher in pitch than the first. I speak of it as in two parts,
though when my companions came to hear it, as they did the next day,
they reported it as in three. We visited the place together afterwards,
and the discrepancy was readily explained. As to pitch, the song _is_ in
three parts, but as to rhythm and character, it is in two; the first
half being composed of double notes, the second of single notes. The
resemblance to the Nashville's song lies entirely in the first part; the
notes of the concluding portion are not run together or jumbled, after
the Nashville's manner, but are quite as distinct as those of the
opening measure.

As there were at least two pairs of the birds, and they were
unmistakably at home, we naturally had hope of finding one of the nests.
We made several random attempts, and one day I devoted an hour or more
to a really methodical search; but the wily singer gave me not the
slightest clue, behaving as if there were no such thing as a bird's nest
within a thousand miles, and all my endeavors went for nothing.

As might have been foreseen, Franconia proved to be an excellent place
in which to study the difficult family of flycatchers. All our common
eastern Massachusetts species were present,--the kingbird, the phoebe,
the wood pewee, and the least flycatcher,--and with them the crested
flycatcher (not common), the olive-sided, the traill, and the
yellow-bellied. The phoebe-like cry of the traill was to be heard
constantly from the hotel piazza. The yellow-bellied seemed to be
confined to deep and rather swampy woods in the valley, and to the
mountain-side forests; being most numerous on Mount Lafayette, where it
ran well up toward the limit of trees. In his notes, the yellow-belly
may be said to take after both the least flycatcher and the wood pewee.
His _killic_ (so written in the books, and I do not know how to improve
upon it) resembles the _chebec_ of the least flycatcher, though much
less emphatic, as well as much less frequentl