On visiting the Battery a few days ago, one of the park-keepers (himself looking in his bright new uniform somewhat like a blue-jay) expressed his conviction that, next spring, that time-honored pleasure-garden of the old Knickerbockers will be a paradise for song-birds such as it has not been since the original Swedish Nightingale warbled her “woodnotes wild” there a score of years ago, more or less.  The sea-gulls, he thought (will Judge HILTON have the goodness to provide these park officers with manuals of ornithology?), would build their nests in the pine-trees with which the wide esplanade that stretches away to the water’s edge will soon be bristling.  Honest, but mistaken young man!  As well might he have said that the sea-wall [a very substantial one, by the way] would build its nest in the melancholy pines.  But it is reasonable to hope that pine grossbeaks will find their way thither, and that the German flutes of various finches will provide for the coming Bavarians and Hessians (should any be left after the siege of Paris and the sorties of the truculent TROCHU) a welcome such as has not heretofore been accorded to the strangers who at Castle Garden first set foot upon our shore.

The Bowling Green—­late a nuisance and a pandemonium, now an oasis of verdure—­has not as yet reported its owl, but the public eye is upon it, and the nocturnal marauder may yet be detected in the forks of the great willow-trees, which still retain their verdure.  The sparrows are almost disproportionately numerous in this small park, but this may be accounted for.  It has lately been laid down with new grass, the green, tender blades of which, just now beginning to crop out, are probably mistaken by the birds for “sparrow-grass” munificently provided for them by the Commissioners.

In all of these city parks the contrast between past and present is very striking and agreeable.  But a few short months ago they were the domiciles and dormitories of outcast roughs and vagrants of the worst description, whose “’owls,” as a Cockney explorer observed, “made night ’ideous.”  The only muss now common to them is the mus tribe, comprising the mus ratus, or ordinary rat (so called from its haunting ordinaries, we suppose), and the timid mouse, with which the Bird of Wisdom is contented to put up when the sparrows decline to come to his claw.

Central Park offers numerous attractions now to all who love to keep up their animal spirits by studying animal life.  There is a fat little Asiatic pig there, who is the very picture of content.  A red pig he is, and exceedingly well behaved.  The best red pig, in fact, that we remember ever to have seen, beating the learned pig by several trumps and an ace.  When we last saw him he was very busy with his pen, and our surmise was that his mind was fully occupied with arrangements for editing the works of BACON, or, possibly, those of HOGG.