with unrestricted
freedom, where food and lodging in abundance, and of the best, will be
supplied, where bathing-pools will be at their service, where
blossoming trees will welcome them in the spring and fields of grain in
the fall, quiet places where these privileges will bring to the birds
much joy and contentment. Throughout this country there should be a
concerted effort to convert the cemeteries, the homes of our friends
who have gone away, into sanctuaries for the bird life of this land.
And what isolated spots could be more welcome to the birds than these
places that hold so many sad memories for human beings?

No place in the world ought to speak more forcibly to us of the
Resurrection than the cemeteries of our land. In them we should hear
inspiring bird songs, {228} notice the nesting of birds, and the little
ones preparing for their flight into the world. There we should find
beautiful flowers and waving grain, typical of that spiritual harvest
which should be associated in our minds with comfort and peace.

_A Birdless Cemetery._--I visited, not long ago, one of the old-time
cemeteries, the pride of a neighbouring city. It was indeed a place of
beauty to the eye; but to my mind there is always something flat and
insipid about a landscape lacking the music of singing birds.
Therefore I looked and listened for my feathered friends. Some English
Sparrows flew up from the drive, and I heard the rusty hinge-like notes
of a small company of Purple Crackles that were nesting, I suspected,
in the pine trees down the slope, but of really cheerful bird life
there appeared to be none in this artificially beautified, forty-acre
enclosure. There is no reason to suppose that, under normal
conditions, birds would shun a cemetery any more than does the
traditional graveyard rabbit.

It was not dread of the dead, such as some mortals {229} have, that
kept the song birds from this place; it was the work of the living that
had driven them away. From one boundary to another there was scarcely
a yard of underbrush where a Thrasher or Chewink might lurk, or in
which a Redstart, or a dainty Chestnut-sided Warbler, might place its
nest. Not a drop of water was discoverable, where a bird might slake
its thirst. Neither in limb nor bole was there a single cavity where a
Titmouse, Wren, or Bluebird might construct a bed for its young. No
fruit-bearing trees were there to invite the birds in summer; nor, so
far as I could