ve ever hard sing in the night has been the
chip-bird. I should say he sang about as often during the darkness as
cocks crow. One can hardly help fancying that he sings in his dreams.

"Father of light, what sunnie seed,
What glance of day hast thou confined
Into this bird? To all the breed
This busie ray thou hast assigned;
Their magnetism works all night,
And dreams of Paradise and light."

On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo strike the hours
nearly all night with the regularity of a Swiss clock.

The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that end, bring us
the flicker every summer, and almost daily I hear his wild scream and
laugh close at hand, himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a few days
ago I had the satisfaction of studying him through the blinds as he sat
on a tree within a few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes
good his claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a
notion that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through the
bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The regular rings of such
perforations which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem to give
some probability to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail
visits us, and, unseen among the currant bushes, alls _Bob White, Bob
White,_ as if he were playing at hide-and-seek with that imaginary
being. A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo
(something like the muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered with
snow) I have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the good luck to see
close by me in the mulberry-tree. The wild-pigeon, once numerous, I have
not seen for many years.(1) Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then
quarters himself upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a tree
after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me a near shot from
my study-window one drizzly day for several hours. But it was Sunday,
and I gave him the benefit of its gracious truce of God.

(1) They made their appearance again this summer (1870).--J.R.L.

Certain birds have disappeared from our neighborhood within my
memory. I remember when the whippoorwill could be heard in Sweet Auburn.
The night-hawk, once common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved
farther up country. For years I have not seen or heard any of the larger
owls, whose hooting was once of my boyish terrors. The cliff-swallow,
strange emigrant, that eastward takes his