m, are shut away from me, I hear an
occasional robin and Baltimore oriole. Very rarely a woodpecker will go
over. The great northern shrike is a frequent winter visitor, but by ill
chance I have not been up when he has called at the roof.

One of these fiend birds haunts a small court only a block away, which is
inclosed in a high board fence, topped with nails. He likes the court
because of these nails. They are sharp; they will stick clean through the
body of a sparrow. Sometimes the fiend has a dozen sparrows run through
with them, leaving the impaled bodies to flutter in the wind and finally
fall away.

In sight from my roof are three tiny patches of the harbor; sometimes a
fourth, when the big red-funneled liner is gone from her slip. Down to
the water of the harbor in flocks from the north come other winter
visitors, the herring and black-backed gulls. Often during the winter I
find them in my sky.

One day they will cross silently over the city in a long straggling line.
Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voices
shrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead, the
snow-white bodies of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the roofs
like patches of foam. I hear the sea--the wind, the surf, the wild, fierce
tumult of the shore--whenever the white gulls sail screaming into my
winter sky.

I have never lived under a wider reach of sky than that above my roof. It
offers a clear, straight, six-minute course to the swiftest wedge of wild
geese. Spring and autumn the geese and ducks go over, and their passage is
the most thrilling event in all my bird calendar.

It is because the ducks fly high and silent that I see them so rarely.
They are always a surprise. You look, and there against the dull sky they
move, strange dark forms that set your blood leaping. But I never see a
string of them winging over that I do not think of a huge thousand-legger
crawling the clouds.

My glimpses of the geese are largely chance, too. Several times, through
the open window by my table, I have heard the faint, far-off honking, and
have hurried to the roof in time to watch the travelers disappear. One
spring day I was upon the roof when a large belated flock came over,
headed north. It was the 20th of April, and the morning had broken very
warm. I could see that the geese were hot and tired. They were barely
clearing the church spires. On they came, their wedge wide and straggling,
un