spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return
to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an
unworthy opponent, rising to the heights where the braggart is dazed
and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I am not sure but is is worthy
of imitation.

But summer wanes, and autumn approaches. The songsters of the
seed-time are silent at the reaping of the harvest. Other minstrels
take up the strain. It is the heyday of insect life. The day is
canopied with musical sound. All the songs of the spring and summer
appear to be floating, softened and refined, in the upper air. The
birds, in a new but less holiday suit, turn their faces southward. The
swallows flock and go; the bobolinks flock and go; silently and
unobserved, the thrushes go. Autumn arrives, bringing finches,
warblers, sparrows, and kinglets from the north. Silently the
procession passes. Yonder hawk, sailing peacefully away till he is
lost in the horizon, is a symbol of the closing season and the
departing birds. 1863.



II

IN THE HEMLOCKS

Most people receive with incredulity a statement of the number of
birds that annually visit our climate. Very few even are aware of half
the number that spend the summer in their own immediate vicinity. We
little suspect, when we walk in the woods, whose privacy we are
intruding upon,--what rare and elegant visitants from Mexico, from