be excused for
his ignorance of the official programme. It is wonderful how shy he
is,--the more wonderful, because, during his migrations, his manner is
so very different. Then, even in a city park you may watch him at your
leisure, while his loud, clear whistle is often to be heard rising above
a din of horse-cars and heavy wagons. But here, in his summer quarters,
you will listen to his song a hundred times before you once catch a
glimpse of the singer. At first thought it seems strange that a bird
should be most at home when he is away from home; but in the one case
he has nothing but his own safety to consult, while in the other he is
thinking of those whose lives are more to him than his own, and whose
hiding-place he is every moment on the alert to conceal.

In Massachusetts we do not expect to find sparrows in deep woods. They
belong in fields and pastures, in roadside thickets, or by fence-rows
and old stone-walls bordered with barberry bushes and alders. But these
white-throats are children of the wilderness. It is one charm of their
music that it always comes, or seems to come, from such a
distance,--from far up the mountain-side, or from the inaccessible
depths of some ravine. I shall not soon forget its wild beauty as it
rose out of the spruce forests below me, while I was enjoying an evening
promenade, all by myself, over the long, flat summit of Moosilauke. From
his habit of singing late at night this sparrow is in some places known
as the nightingale. His more common name is the Peabody bird; while a
Jefferson man, who was driving me over the Cherry Mountain road, called
him the Peverly bird, and told me the following story:--

A farmer named Peverly was walking about his fields one spring morning,
trying to make up his mind whether the time had come to put in his
wheat. The question was important, and he was still in a deep quandary,
when a bird spoke up out of the wood and said, "Sow wheat, Peverly,
Peverly, Peverly!--Sow wheat, Peverly, Peverly, Peverly!" That settled
the matter. The wheat was sown, and in the fall a most abundant harvest
was gathered; and ever since then this little feathered oracle has been
known as the Peverly bird.

We have improved on the custom of the ancients: they examined a bird's
entrails; we listen to his song. Who says the Yankee is not wiser than
the Greek?

But I was lying abed in the Crawford House when the voice of
_Zonotrichia albicollis_ sent my thoughts thus as