pair, though two broods of five each are raised there every
summer. How do they settle their claim to the homestead? By what right
of primogeniture? Once the children of a man employed about the place
_oologized_ the nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two. I
felt towards those boys as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner(1) did
towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at
last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that
I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing with the
unerring precision a stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her
smaller deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning; and
during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of _pewee_
with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He saddens with the
season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to _cheu, pewee!_
as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a
plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often to pursue a
fly through the open window into my library.

(1) In Coleridge's poem of that name.

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old
friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had,
at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs, and to which
I cannot say,

"Many light hearts and wings,
Which now be head, lodged in thy living bowers."

My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss
that shy anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying-time
the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of
_scythe-whet._ I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. If
anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair
in my garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my mind
for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they
showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun)
they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they
repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed
contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring that to the
Puritan way with the natives, which converted them to a little Hebraism
and a great deal of Medford rum. If they will not come near enough to me
(as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera-glass,--a much
better weapon than a g