fooled and imposed
upon! Here, too, I saw at different times an adult male blue
yellow-backed warbler, and a bird of the same species in immature
plumage. It seemed highly probable, to say the least, that the young
fellow had been reared not far off, the more so as the neighboring
Wellfleet woods were spectral with hanging lichens, of the sort which
this exquisite especially affects. At first I wondered why this
particular little grove, by no means peculiarly inviting in appearance,
should be the favorite resort of so many birds,--robins, orioles, wood
pewees, kingbirds, chippers, golden warblers, black-and-white creepers,
prairie warblers, red-eyed vireos, and blue yellow-backs; but I
presently concluded that a fine spring of water just across the road
must be the attraction. Near the spring was a vegetable garden, and
here, on the 22d of August, I suddenly espied a water thrush teetering
upon the tip of a bean-pole, his rich olive-brown back glistening in the
sunlight. He soon dropped to the ground among the vines, and before long
walked out into sight. His action when he saw me was amusing. Instead of
darting back, as a sparrow, for instance, would have done, he flew up to
the nearest perch; that is, to the top of the nearest bean-pole, which
happened to be a lath. Wood is one of the precious metals on Cape Cod,
and if oars are used for fence-rails, and fish-nets for hen-coops, why
not laths for bean-poles? The perch was narrow, but wide enough for the
bird's small feet. Four times he came up in this way to look about him,
and every time alighted thus on the top of a pole. At the same moment
three prairie warblers were chasing each other about the garden, now
clinging to the side of the poles, now alighting on their tips. It was a
strange spot for prairie warblers, as it seemed to me, though they
looked still more out of place a minute later, when they left the
bean-patch and sat upon a rail fence in an open grassy field. Cape Cod
birds, like Cape Cod men, know how to shift their course with the wind.
Where else would one be likely to see prairie warblers, black-throated
greens, and black-and-white creepers scrambling in company over the red
shingles of a house-roof, and song sparrows singing day after day from a
chimney-top?

In all my wanderings in Dyer's Hollow, only once did I see anything of
that pest of the seashore, the sportsman; then, in the distance, two
young fellows, with a highly satisfactory want of suc