“What’s that?” asked Rap; “it’s a bird I often see near the mill, catching flies on the wing.”

“It is called the Wood Pewee,” said the Doctor; “when we come back this afternoon we will stop, and I will try to find its nest to show you.  We must go on now.”  As soon as they drove out of the wood, the smell of the salt marsh came to them, and they saw that the road led between low meadows, with wooded knolls here and there.  By and by the trees grew thinner and the grass coarser.

“Oh, I see the water!” cried Dodo, “and the little house where we are going!  Oh, look at the black birds flying over those bushes!  Are those Cowbirds too?  And there are more black birds, very big ones too, going over to the water, and more yet coming out of those stumpy little pines, and there are some yellow pigeons down in the grass!  Do stop quick, Olive!  I think there is going to be a bird clambake or a picnic down here!” And Dodo nearly fell out of the surrey in her excitement.

“Not exactly a picnic,” said the Doctor, “but what I have brought you purposely to see.  The birds flying over the alders are Red-winged Blackbirds; those coming from the pines are Purple Grackles; the big black ones flying overhead are Crows; and the yellow-breasted fellows walking in the grass are Meadowlarks.  We must first make the horses comfortable, and then we can spend the day with the birds among these marshes and meadows.”

When they reached the beach the wagon track led through a hedge of barberry bushes to a shed covered with pine boughs at the back of the fisherman’s house.

The fisherman himself came out to help them with the horses.  He was a Finlander, Olaf Neilsen, who kept boats in summer, fished, and tended two buoy lights at the river entrance for a living.  His hut stood on a point, with the sandy beach of the bay in front of it, and the steeper bank where the river ran on the left.  All the time the water was rushing out, out, out of the river and creeping down on the sand to make low tide.

The children did not know it then, but they were to spend many happy days on this beach, in company with their uncle and Olaf, during the next two years.

The Doctor whispered something mysterious to Olaf about clams, hoes, and “dead low water”; then he told the children to rest awhile under the pine shelter, and hear about the Blackbirds before they went out to see them in the meadows.

THE RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD

(THE HUSSAR)

“This handsome Blackbird comes early and stays late in places where he does not linger all the year.  He loves wet places, and his note is moist and juicy, to match his nesting haunts.  ‘Oncher-la-ree!’ he calls, either in flying or as he walks along the ground after the fashion of his brethren—­for Blackbirds never hop, like most birds, with both feet together, but move one after the other, just as we do.