Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/28

10 have before now felt something like relief at its conclusion. Now, then, I have said, the birds that are here will stay for at least a month or two, and life may be lived a little more at leisure.

This year, by all the accounts that reach me, the migration has been of extraordinary fullness. Only last night a man took a seat by me in an electric car and said, what for substance I have heard from many others, that he and his family, who live in a desirably secluded, woody spot, had never before seen so many birds, especially so many warblers.

How wiser men than myself explain this unusual state of things I do not know. To me it seems likely that the unseasonable cold weather caught the first large influx of May birds in our latitude, and held them here while succeeding waves came falling in behind them. The current was dammed, so to speak, and of course the waters rose.

Some persons, I hear, had strange experiences. I am told of one man who picked a black-throated blue warbler from a bush,