look at him! Oh-h-h!" The dinner might

"get cold," as the prudent housewife suggested, but it did not matter. Such a color as those bluebirds displayed was better than anything that an eater could put into his mouth.

Yes, as I say, the birds are having their innings. In whichever direction I walk, in town or country, I am asked about them. A schoolgirl stopped me in the street the other day. "Can you tell me what that bird is?" she inquired. A white-breasted nuthatch was whistling over our heads in a shade tree. Possibly the study of live birds will be as fashionable a few years hence as the wearing of dead ones was a few years ago.

On the 22d of March, as I stood listening to a most uncommonly brilliant song sparrow (now is the time for such things, before the greater artists monopolize our attention) and the outgivings of a too chary fox sparrow, the first cowbird of the year announced himself. Polygamist, shirk, and, by all our human standards, general reprobate, I was still glad to hear him. He is what he was made. Few birds are more interesting, psychologically, if one wishes an object of study.