of the weasel or skunk.  These he will not refuse; for though he is of a different species from the carrion crow of Europe, with whom he was formerly confounded, yet he is of similar, though perhaps less extreme, tastes as to his food.  But when the ground is freshly covered with snow, all supplies of this sort would seem to be cut off, for the time at least.  Yet who ever found a starved crow, or even saw one driven by hunger from any of his accustomed caution?  He is ever the same alert, vivacious, harsh-tongued wanderer over the white fields as over the summer meadows.

A partial solution of the mystery is to be found in the habit which the bird has in common with most of the crow kind, of depositing any surplus food in a place of safety for future use.  A tame crow that I saw last year was constantly employed in this way.  As soon as his hunger was satisfied, if a piece of meat was given to him, he flew off to some remote spot, and there covered it up with twigs and leaves.  I was told that the woods were full of these caches of his.  Bits of bread and the like he was too well-fed to care much about, but he would generally go through the form of covering them, at your very feet, with a little rubbish, not taking the trouble to hide them.  Meanwhile his hunting went on as if he still had his living to get, and he would watch for field-mice, or come flying in from the woods with a squirrel swinging from his claws, either for variety’s sake, or because he had really forgotten the stores he had laid up.  Scattered magazines of this kind, established in times of accidental plenty, may render life during our winters possible to the crow.

But why should he give himself so much trouble to subsist here, when a few hours’ work with those broad wings would bear him to a land of tropical abundance?  The crow, it seems, is not a mere eating and drinking machine, drawn hither and thither by the balance of supply and demand, but has his motives of another sort.  Is it, perhaps, some local attachment, so that a crow hatched in Brookline, for example, would be more loath than another to quit that neighborhood,—­a sort of crow patriotism, akin to that which keeps the Greenlanders slowly starving of cold and hunger on that awful coast of theirs.

It is not probable, however, that the crow allows himself to suffer much from these causes; he is far too knowing for that, and shows his position at the head of the bird kind by an almost total emancipation from scruples and prejudices, and by the facility with which he adapts himself to special cases.  Instinct works by formulas, which, as it were, make up the animal, so that the ant and the bee are atoms of incarnate constructiveness and acquisitiveness, and nothing else.  And as intelligence, when its action is too narrowly concentrated, whether upon pin-making or money-making, tends to degenerate into mere instinct,—­so instinct, when it begins to compare, and to except, and to vary its action according to circumstances,