umage, set
off by the snow, and their cheerful cry, are especially welcome. They
would have furnished Aesop with a fable, for the feathered crest in
which they seem to take so much satisfaction is often their fatal snare.
Country boys make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust just large
enough to admit the jay's head, and, hollowing it out somewhat beneath,
bait it with a few kernels of corn. The crest slips easily into the
trap, but refuses to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast
remains a prey.

Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settlement in my
pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of preemption,
so successfully played the part of border-ruffians as to drive them
away,--to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have
for rooks. At Shady Hill(1) (now, alas! empty of its so long-loved
household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery than
their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs)
as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy
politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of the day.
Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as martial as that
of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with my corn, so
far as I could discover.

(1) The home of the Nortons, in Cambridge, who were at the time of this
paper in Europe.

For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an irresistible bait
for boys, and their settlement was broken up. They grew so wonted as
to throw off a great part of their shyness, and to tolerate my near
approach. One very hot day I stood for some time within twenty feet of a
mother and three children, who sat on an elm bough over my head gasping
in the sultry air, and holding their wings half-spread for coolness.
All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and
murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition
and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a
lover, and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint
Preux(1) standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman
quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my ear more melodious than
his caw of a clear winter morning as it drops to you filtered through
five hundred fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller
birds makes the moral character of the row, for all his deaconlike
demeanor and garb, some