Night Hawk Purple Gallinule
Belted Kingfisher Canada Goose
Kingbird Wood Duck
Woodthrush Hooded Merganser
Catbird Double-crested Cormorant
White-bellied Nuthatch Arctic Tern
Brown Creeper Great Northern Diver
Bohemian Chatterer Stormy Petrel
Great Northern Shrike Arctic Puffin
Shore Lark Black Guillemot

[Illustration:  “He already knew the Downy Woodpecker”]

But badly as they were presented, the pictures were yet information, and were entered in his memory as lasting accessions to his store of truth about the Wild Things.

Of course, he already knew some few birds whose names are familiar to every schoolboy:  the Robin, Bluebird, Kingbird, Wild Canary, Woodpecker, Barn-swallow, Wren, Chickadee, Wild Pigeon, Humming-bird, Pewee, so that his list was steadily increased.

V

The Collarless Stranger

Oh, sympathy! the noblest gift of God to man.  The greatest bond there is twixt man and man.  The strongest link in any friendship chain.  The single lasting hold in kinship’s claim.  The only incorrosive strand in marriage bonds.  The blazing torch where genius lights her lamp.  The ten times noble base of noblest love.  More deep than love—­more strong than hate—­the biggest thing in all the universe—­the law of laws.  Grant but this greatest gift of God to man—­this single link concatenating grant, and all the rest are worthless or comprised.

Each year the ancient springtime madness came more strongly on Yan.  Each year he was less inclined to resist it, and one glorious day of late April in its twelfth return he had wandered northward along to a little wood a couple of miles from the town.  It was full of unnamed flowers and voices and mysteries.  Every tree and thicket had a voice—­a long ditch full of water had many that called to him. “Peep-peep-peep,” they seemed to say in invitation for him to come and see.  He crawled again and again to the ditch and watched and waited.  The loud whistle would sound only a few rods away, “Peep-peep-peep,” but ceased at each spot when he came near—­sometimes before him, sometimes behind, but never where he was.  He searched through a small pool with his hands, sifted out sticks and leaves, but found nothing else.  A farmer going by told him it was only a “spring Peeper,” whatever that was, “some kind of a critter in the water.”