bbages, the tender lettuce, even the
thriving shoots on my young fruit trees had vanished. And there they
were, looking quietly on the ruin they had made. Our watch-dog, too, was
foregathering with them. It was too much; so I got a large stick and
drove them all out, except a young heifer, whom I chased all over the
flower-beds, breaking down my trellises, my woodbines and sweet-briers,
my roses and petunias, until I cornered her in the hotbed. I had to call
for assistance to extricate her from the sashes, and her owner has sued
me for damages. I believe I shall move in town.

* * * * *

Mrs. Sparrowgrass and I have concluded to try it once more; we are going
to give the country another chance. After all, birds in the spring are
lovely. First come little snowbirds, _avant-couriers_ of the feathered
army; then bluebirds in national uniforms, just graduated, perhaps, from
the ornithological corps of cadets with high honors in the topographical
class; then follows a detachment of flying artillery--swallows;
sand-martens, sappers and miners, begin their mines and countermines
under the sandy parapets; then cedar birds, in trim jackets faced with
yellow--aha, dragoons! And then the great rank and file of infantry,
robins, wrens, sparrows, chipping-birds; and lastly--the band!

From nature's old cathedral sweetly ring
The wild bird choirs--burst of the woodland band,
--who mid the blossoms sing;
Their leafy temple, gloomy, tall and grand,
Pillared with oaks, and roofed with Heaven's own hand.

There, there, that is Mario. Hear that magnificent chest note from the
chestnuts! then a crescendo, falling in silence--_a plomb!_

Hush! he begins again with a low, liquid monotone, mounting by degrees
and swelling into an infinitude of melody--the whole grove dilating, as
it were, with exquisite epithalamium.

Silence now--and how still!

Hush! the musical monologue begins anew; up, up into the tree-tops it
mounts, fairly lifting the leaves with its passionate effluence, it
trills through the upper branches--and then dripping down the listening
foliage, in a cadenza of matchless beauty, subsides into silence again.

"That's a he catbird," says my carpenter.

A catbird? Then Shakespeare and Shelley have wasted powder upon the
skylark; for never such "profuse strains of unpremeditated art" issued
from living bird before. Skylark! pooh! who would rise at dawn to hear
the