sociable of our
birds, of course pays me his frequent visit, hopping in at the door and
picking up I don't know what upon the floor. A barn-swallow occasionally
darts in through the open window and out again at the door, as though
for very sport, only a few days since skimming beneath my nose, while
its wings fairly tipped the pen with which I was writing. The chipmonk
has long made himself at home, and his scratching footsteps on my
door-sill, or even in my closet, is a not uncommon episode. Now and then
through the day I hear a soft pat-pat on the hard-wood floor, at
intervals of a few seconds, and realize that my pet toad, which has
voluntarily taken up its abode in an old bowl on the closet floor, is
taking his afternoon outing, and with his always seemingly inconsistent
lightning tongue is picking up his casual flies at three inches sight
around the base-board.

A mouse, I see, has heaped a neat little pile of seeds upon the top of
the wainscot near by--cherry pits, polygonum, and ragweed seeds, and
others, including some small oak-galls, which I find have been
abstracted from a box of specimens which I had stored in the closet for
safe-keeping. I wonder if it is the same little fellow that built its
nest in an old shoe in the same closet last year, and, among other
mischief, removed the white grub in a similar lot of specimen galls
which I also missed, and subsequently found in the shoe and scattered on
the closet floor?

I have mentioned the murmur of the bees, but the incessant buzzing of
flies and wasps is an equally prominent sound. Then there is the
occasional sortie of the dragon-fly, making his gauzy, skimming circuit
about the room, or suggestively bobbing around against wall or ceiling;
and that occasional audible episode of the stifled, expiring buzz of a
fly, which is too plainly in the toils of Arachne up yonder! For in one
corner of my room I boast of a prize dusty "cobweb," as yet spared from
the household broom, a gossamer arena of two years' standing, which
makes a dense span of a length of about two feet from a clump of dried
hydrangea blossoms to the sill of a transom-window, and which, of
course, somewhere in its dusty spread, tapers off into a dark tunnel,
where lurks the eight-eyed schemer, "o'erlooking all his waving snares
around."

Sooner or later, it would seem, every too constant buzzing visitor
encroaches on its domain, and is drawn to its silken vortex, and is
eventually shed below