n the city! Any but a parrot.

A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves-trough, so close to the roof
that I can overhear their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar Cock
Sparrow is a family man--so entirely a family man as to be nothing else at
all. He is a success, too. It does me good to see him build. He tore the
old nest all away in the early winter, so as to be ready. There came a
warm springish day in February, and he began. A blizzard stopped him, but
with the melting of the snow he went to work again, completing the nest by
the middle of March.

He built for a big family, and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but _them_; for
there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the
course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the
children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof
above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife
came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at
the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then
crawl dutifully in upon the eggs.

I knew how he felt. It is not in a cock sparrow to enjoy hatching eggs. I
respected him; for though he grumbled, as any normal husband might, still
he was "drinking fair" with Mrs. Sparrow. He built and brooded and foraged
for his family, if not as sweetly, yet as faithfully, as his wife. He
deserved his blessed abundance of children.

Is he songless, sooty, uninteresting, vulgar? Not if you live on a roof.
He may be all of this, a pest even, in the country. But upon my roof, for
weeks at a stretch, his is the only bird voice I hear. Throughout the
spring, and far into the summer, I watch the domestic affairs in the
eaves-trough. During the winter, at nightfall, I see little bands and
flurries of birds scudding over and dropping behind the high buildings to
the east. They are sparrows on the way to their roost in the elms of an
old mid-city burial-ground.

I not infrequently spy a hawk soaring calmly far away above the roof. Not
only the small ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger, wilder
species come, and winding up close to the clouds, circle and circle there,
trying apparently to see some meaning in the maze of moving, intersecting
lines of dots below yonder in the cracks of that smoking, rumbling blur.

In the spring, from the trees of the Common, which are close, but, except
for the crown of one noble English el