. "Addison, can you tell him
what they say?"

"Yes," replied Ad, laughing, "they say and say it very distinctly, too,
'Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me whistle?' Charlotte is his
mate, you know; and the reply to that is 'Philip, Philip's sitting on
the thistle.'"

"That is a little different from what they used to tell me when I was a
boy," Gramp remarked. "I was told that they say, 'War-link, war-link,
christle, christle, christle; high-link, high-link, twiddle, twiddle,
twiddle.'"

"Good deal anybody knows what a bird says," Halstead exclaimed,
derisively. "They don't say anything that I can make out."

But it seemed to me, after Addison had mentioned it, that the first, or
opening note of the song sparrow, was much like, "Charlotte, Charlotte,
don't you hear me whistle?" They had several other notes, too, not as
easily likened to human language; indeed, these humble little sparrows,
when one comes to listen closely to them in all their moods, have a
curious variety of short _arias_.

During my second week at the farm, I found a sparrow's nest in a small
bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture bars, with four
eggs, resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden beans; and
I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks
were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; something had
taken them. Addison said that it was most likely a crow, but possibly a
snake. We often found the nests, while haying in the fields; the scythe
generally passed over them without doing any harm, and to save them from
the rake, we would put up a stick close beside them. But their enemies
are wofully numerous; not half the nests of young are reared. Ants, I
think, kill numbers of the nestlings, soon after they are hatched, when
they chance to be near an ant-hill.

But in the early mornings and evenings, and before the quickly gathering
south rains, the songsters of all others, which made the air vocal, were
the great, bold, red-breasted robins, not fewer than nine pairs of which
had their capacious nests in the garden, orchard and Balm o' Gilead
trees. They always took the greater part of our cherries, till Addison
at a considerable expense, some years later, bought mosquito netting to
spread over the tree tops; and they also ate strawberries greedily; but
we as constantly overlooked their offenses, they sang so royally and
came familiarly back to us so early every spring. No one