way to represent to life the manifold use
of friendship is to cast and see how many things there are which a man
cannot do himself." How aptly their case illustrates the not unusual
coexistence of formal ignorance with real knowledge! Having their
Southern brother's fondness for fish without his skill in catching it,
they adopt a plan worthy of the great essayist himself,--they court the
society of the gulls; and with a temper eminently philosophical, not to
say Baconian, they cheerfully sit at their patrons' second table. From
the Common you may see them almost any day (in some seasons, at least)
flying back and forth between the river and the harbor. One morning in
early March I witnessed quite a procession, one small company after
another, the largest numbering eleven birds, though it was nothing to
compare with what seems to be a daily occurrence at some places further
south. At another time, in the middle of January, I saw what appeared to
be a flock of herring gulls sailing over the city, making progress in
their own wonderfully beautiful manner, circle after circle. But I
noticed that about a dozen of them were black! What were these? If they
could have held their peace I might have gone home puzzled; but the crow
is in one respect a very polite bird: he will seldom fly over your head
without letting fall the compliments of the morning, and a vigorous
_caw, caw_ soon proclaimed my black gulls to be simply erratic specimens
of _Corvus Americanus_. Why were they conducting thus strangely? Had
they become so attached to their friends as to have taken to imitating
them unconsciously? Or were they practicing upon the vanity of these
useful allies of theirs, these master fishermen? Who can answer? The
ways of shrewd people are hard to understand; and in all New England
there is no shrewder Yankee than the crow.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] See a letter by Dr. Fritz Muller, "Butterflies as Botanists:"
_Nature_, vol. xxx. p. 240. Of similar import is the case, cited by Dr.
Asa Gray (in the _American Journal of Science_, November, 1884, p. 325),
of two species of plantain found in this country, which students have
only of late discriminated, although it turns out that the cows have all
along known them apart, eating one and declining the other,--the bovine
taste being more exact, it would seem, or at any rate more prompt, than
the botanist's lens.

[21] Unlike the snow bunting and the red-poll, however, the pine
grosbeak is beli