the birds as they sweep past in these
flurries, their flight is so unlike their usual clumsy scuttle as they get
out of one's way along the street. They are lumpish and short-winged on
the street; they labor and lumber off with a sidewise twist to their
bodies that reminds one of a rheumatic old dog upon the trot. What
suggestion of grace or swiftness about them upon the ground? But watch
them in their evening flight. It is a revelation. They rise above the
houses and shoot across my sky like a charge of canister. I can almost
hear them whizz. Down by the cemetery I have seen them dash into view high
up in the slit of sky, dive for the trees, dart zigzag like a madly
plunging kite, and hurl themselves, as soft as breaths, among the
branches.

This is going to bed with a vengeance. I never saw any other birds get to
roost with such velocity. It is characteristic, however; the sparrow never
does anything by halves. The hurry is not caused by any mite of anxiety or
fear, rather from pure excess of spirit; for after rearing three broods
during the summer, he has such a superabundance of vim that a winter of
foraging and fighting is welcome exercise. The strenuous life is his kind
of life. When the day's hunt is over and he turns back to his bed, why not
race it out with his neighbors? And so they come--chasing, dodging,
tagging neck and neck, all spurting to finish first at the roost.

We may not love him; but he has constitution and snap. And these things do
count.

One April morning, the 6th, I went down to the roost at three o'clock. The
sparrows were sleeping soundly. It was yet night. Had the dawn been
reaching up above the dark walls that shut the east away from the high
tree-tops, the garish street light would have kept it dim. The trees were
silent and stirless, as quiet as the graves beneath them--more quiet; in
fact; for there issued from a grated hole among the tombs the sound of an
anvil, deep down and muffled, but unmistakably ringing, as if Governor
Winthrop were forging chains in his vault. Then came a rush, a deadened
roar, and an emanation of dank gaseous breath, such as the dead alone
breathe.

It was only the passing of a tool-car in the subway underneath the
cemetery, and the hammering of a workman at a forge in a niche of the
tunnel. But, rising out of the tombs, it was gruesome and unearthly in the
night-quiet.

The sparrows did not mind the sound. Maybe it ascended as a pleasant
murmur to them a