en them and its bounties. Next summer I must
let the weeds grow up in my garden, so that they may have a better
chance for seeds above the stingy level of the universal white. Of
late I have opened a pawnbroker's shop for my hard-pressed brethren
in feathers, lending at a fearful rate of interest; for every
borrowing Lazarus will have to pay me back in due time by monthly
instalments of singing. I shall have mine own again with usury.
But were a man never so usurious, would he not lend a winter seed
for a summer song? Would he refuse to invest his stale crumbs in
an orchestra of divine instruments and a choir of heavenly voices?
And to-day, also, I ordered from a nursery-man more trees of holly,
juniper, and fir, since the storm-beaten cedars will have to come
down. For in Kentucky, when the forest is naked, and every shrub
and hedge-row bare, what would become of our birds in the universal
rigor and exposure of the world if there were no evergreens--nature's
hostelries for the homeless ones? Living in the depths of these,
they can keep snow, ice, and wind at bay; prying eyes cannot watch
them, nor enemies so well draw near; cones or seed or berries are
their store; and in these untrodden chambers each can have the
sacred company of his mate. But wintering here has terrible risks
which few run. Scarcely in autumn have the leaves begun to drop
from their high perches silently downward when the birds begin to
drop away from the bare boughs silently southward. Lo! some morning
the leaves are on the ground, and the birds have vanished. The
species that remain, or that come to us then, wear the hues of
the season, and melt into the tone of Nature's background--blues,
grays, browns, with touches of white on tail and breast and wing
for coming flecks of snow.

Save only him--proud, solitary stranger in our unfriendly land--the
fiery grosbeak. Nature in Kentucky has no wintry harmonies for him.
He could find these only among the tufts of the October sumac, or
in the gum-tree when it stands a pillar of red twilight fire in
the dark November woods, or in the far depths of the crimson sunset
skies, where, indeed, he seems to have been nested, and whence to
have come as a messenger of beauty, bearing on his wings the light
of his diviner home.

With almost everything earthly that he touches this high herald
of the trees is in contrast. Among his kind he is without a peer.
Even when the whole company of summer voyage