by means of which they can be attracted to nest in any
given locality; their tastes are not well enough known to us; "houses,"
like those which attract the blue-bird and the martin, possess no charm
for the oriole. With the first of June Gram watched, wistfully, for the
return of this pair, during a number of successive springs; and for her
sake especially, we all hoped they would come back.

I arrived too late the first spring, to hear the woodlands echo to the
May-note of the white-throated sparrow. Once only, while going out to
get the cows with little Wealthy, the second week after I came, I heard
it twice repeated, from the woods along the south side of the pasture,
and when I asked my small companion what kind of a bird that was, she
roguishly cried, "Oh, that's old Ben Peabody."

"Is that what he says?" I asked, for the name at once struck me as being
like the bird's note.

"Yes," cried Wealthy. "He says, 'Old Ben Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,'
just as plain as anything; Theodora says so; and so does Nell and all of
us, but Addison. Ad thinks he says, 'All day whittling, whittling,
whittling.' And Alf Batchelder says,--but I'll not tell what he thinks
the bird says."

"What is it?" I queried.

"It's nothing very pretty," quoth Wealthy, running off to get around the
cows, thereby evading the question altogether, for she had not as yet
grown very well acquainted with me.

But I have perhaps lingered too long with birds and bird-songs. It is a
fond subject, however, and scarcely can I forbear to speak of the
veeries, the vesper-birds, and "hair-birds" whose nests we so often
found in the orchard; the cedar birds or cherry birds which so
persistently stripped the wild cherry trees and pear-plum shrubs; the
wood thrushes that trilled forth such sad, mellow refrains in the cool,
gray border of the wood-lot below the fields, at eventide; the
yellow-hammers that tapped on the pasture stumps and cried out
boisterously when rain was impending; the wrens that filled and
re-filled a bit of hollow aqueduct log on the lane wall, with sticks for
a nest and laid thirteen eggs in it; the hundreds of black-birds that
built in the reeds down at the great bog, near the head of the lake; the
sap-suckers that punctured the trunks of the apple-trees with thousands
of tiny holes; the many-voiced blue-jays that came around when the corn
was ripening in September and sometimes lingered all winter in the
neighborhood.

And of the gre