Wilson’s thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic of ornithologists.  He flits before me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude.  A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house.  Always on the same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five each are raised there every summer.  How do they settle their claim to the homestead?  By what right of primogeniture?  Once, the children of a man employed about the place ooelogized the nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two.  I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross.  But the pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing....  The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning; and, during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time.  He saddens with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to eheu, pewee!  I as if in lamentation.  Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him.  He is so familiar as often to pursue a fly through the open window into my library.

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of a lifetime.  There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs, to which I cannot say,

  “Many light hearts and wings,
  Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers.”

My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson’s thrush, nor hear in haying time the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet.  I protect my game as jealously as an English squire.  If anybody had ooelogized a certain cuckoo’s nest I know of (I have a pair in my garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my mind for weeks.  I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun), they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways.  And they repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed contempt.  I have made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring that to the Puritan way with the native, which converted them to a little Hebraism and a great deal of Medford rum.  If they will not come near enough to me (as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera-glass,—­a much better weapon than a gun.  I would not, if I could, convert them from their pretty pagan ways.  The only one I sometimes have savage doubts about, is the red squirrel.  I think he ooelogizes; I know he eats cherries, (we counted five of them at one time in a single tree, the stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a storm), and