time that our little brown creeper is a singer. What life could possibly
be more prosaic than his? Day after day, year in and out, he creeps up
one tree-trunk after another, pausing only to peer right and left into
the crevices of the bark, in search of microscopic tidbits. A most
irksome sameness, surely! How the poor fellow must envy the swallows,
who live on the wing, and, as it were, have their home in heaven! So it
is easy for us to think; but I doubt whether the creeper himself is
troubled with such suggestions. He seems, to say the least, as well
contented as the most of us; and, what is more, I am inclined to doubt
whether any except "free moral agents," like ourselves, are ever wicked
enough to find fault with the orderings of Divine Providence. I fancy,
too, that we may have exaggerated the monotony of the creeper's lot. It
can scarcely be that even his days are without their occasional
pleasurable excitements. After a good many trees which yield little or
nothing for his pains, he must now and then light upon one which is like
Canaan after the wilderness,--"a land flowing with milk and honey."
Indeed, the longer I think of it the more confident I feel that every
aged creeper must have had sundry experiences of this sort, which he is
never weary of recounting for the edification of his nephews and nieces,
who, of course, are far too young to have anything like the wide
knowledge of the world which their venerable three-years-old uncle
possesses. _Certhia_ works all day for his daily bread; and yet even of
him it is true that "the life is more than meat." He has his inward
joys, his affectionate delights, which no outward infelicity can touch.
A bird who thinks nothing of staying by his nest and his mate at the
sacrifice of his life is not to be written down a dullard or a drudge,
merely because his dress is plain and his occupation unromantic. He has
a right to sing, for he has something within him to inspire the strain.

There are descriptions of the creeper's music which liken it to a
wren's. I am sorry that I have myself heard it only on one occasion:
then, however, so far was it from being wren-like that it might rather
have been the work of one of the less proficient warblers,--a somewhat
long opening note followed by a hurried series of shorter ones, the
whole given in a sharp, thin voice, and having nothing to recommend it
to notice, considered simply as music. All the while the bird kept on
industriou