Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/217

1857.] —"you see, if I had made love my all, I should have missed it all. Not even Cousin Harry's constancy would have been proof against a withered, whining, sentimental old maid."

"Well, you will allow that it's a great paradox, aunty! If you believe in my doctrine, it turns out a mere delusion; if you don't believe in it, 'tis sure to come true."

"Take care, then, and disbelieve in it with all your might!" said she, laughing, and kissing me, as we left her room,—my room alone henceforth. A shadow seemed to fill it, as she passed the threshold.

our summer birds, the vast majority are but transient visitors, born and bred far to the northward, and returning thither every year. The North, then, is their proper domicile, their legal "place of residence," which they have never renounced, but only temporarily desert, for special reasons. Their sojourn with us, or farther south, is merely an exile by stress of climate, like the flitting of the Southern planters from the rice-fields to the mountains in summer, or the pleasure tour or watering-place visit customary with the citizens of Boston and New York.

The lower orders, such as the humming-bird with his insect-like stomach and sucking-tube, and so on up through the warblers and flycatchers, more strictly bound by the necessities of their life, closely follow the sun,—while the upper-ten-thousand, the robins, cedar-birds, sparrows, etc., like man, omnivorous in their diet and their attendant chevaliers d'industrie, the rapacious birds, allow themselves greater latitude, and go and come occasionally at all seasons, though in general tending to the south in winter and north in summer. But precedence before all is due to permanent residents, with whom our intercourse is not of this transitory and fair-weather sort. Such are the crow, the blue jay, the chickadee, the partridge, and the quail, who may be called regular inhabitants, though perhaps all of them wander occasionally from one district to another. Besides these, perhaps some of the hawks and owls remain here throughout the year. But the species I have named are the only ones that occur to me as equally numerous at all seasons in the immediate vicinity of Boston, and never out of town, whether you take the census in May or in January.

In spite of our uninterrupted acquaintance with them, however, there are still many of the nearest questions concerning these birds for which I find no sufficient answers. Even to the first question—How do they get their living?—there are only vague replies in the books.

There is the crow, for example. I have seen crows in the neighborhood of Boston every week of the year, and in not very different numbers. My friend the ornithologist said to me last winter, "You will see that they will be off as soon as the ground is well covered with snow." But on the contrary, when the snow came, and after it had lain deep on the fields for many days, I saw more than before,—probably because they found it easier to get food in the neighborhood of the houses and cultivated grounds.

A crow must require certainly half a pound of animal food, or its equivalent, daily, in order to keep from starving. Yet they not only do not starve that I hear of, but seem to keep in as good case in winter as in summer, though what