tors
begin to take a prominent place in our avifauna.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

JOHN KEATS.

A WOODCHUCK AND A GREBE

No fact comes to mind which is not more impressed upon us by the valuable
aid of comparisons, and Nature is ever offering antitheses. At this season
we are generally given a brief glimpse--the last for the year--of two
creatures, one a mammal, the other a bird, which are as unlike in their
activities as any two living creatures could well be.

What a type of lazy contentment is the woodchuck, as throughout the hot
summer days he lies on his warm earthen hillock at the entrance of his
burrow. His fat body seems almost to flow down the slope, and when he
waddles around for a nibble of clover it is with such an effort that we
feel sure he would prefer a comfortable slow starvation, were it not for
the unpleasant feelings involved in such a proceeding.

As far as I know there are but two things which, can rouse a woodchuck to
strenuous activity; when a dog is in pursuit he can make his stumpy feet
fairly twinkle as he flies for his burrow, and when a fox or a man is
digging him out, he can literally worm his way through the ground,
frequently escaping by means of his wonderful digging power. But when
September or October days bring the first chill, he gives one last yawn
upon the world and stows himself away at the farthest end of his tunnel,
there to sleep away the winter. Little more does he know of the snows and
blizzards than the bird which has flown to the tropics. Even storing up
fruits or roots is too great an effort for the indolent woodchuck, and in
his hibernation stupor he draws only upon the fat which his lethargic
summer l