4.  Sometimes he pitches from the summit of a tree, begins his song as soon as he gets upon the wing, and flutters tremulously down to the earth, as if overcome with ecstasy at his own music.  Sometimes he is in pursuit of his mate; always in full song, as if he would win her by his melody; and always with the same appearance of intoxication and delight.  Of all the birds of our groves and meadows, the bobolink was the envy of my boyhood.  He crossed my path in the sweetest weather, and the sweetest season of the year, when all nature called to the fields, and the rural feeling throbbed in every bosom; but when I, luckless urchin! was doomed to be mewed up, during the live-long day, in a schoolroom.

5.  It seemed as if the little varlet mocked at me as he flew by in full song, and sought to taunt me with his happier lot.  Oh, how I envied him!  No lessons, no task, no school; nothing but holiday, frolic, green fields, and fine weather.  Had I been then more versed in poetry, I might have addressed him in the words of Logan to the cuckoo: 

    “Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green,
      Thy sky is ever clear;
    Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
      No winter in thy year.

    “Oh. could I fly, I’d fly with thee! 
      We’d make, with joyful wing,
    Our annual visit o’er the globe,
      Companions of the spring.”

6.  Further observation and experience have given me a different idea of this feathered voluptuary, which I will venture to impart for the benefit of my young readers, who may regard him with the same unqualified envy and admiration which I once indulged.  I have shown him only as I saw him at first, in what I may call the poetical part of his career, when he, in a manner, devoted himself to elegant pursuits and enjoyments, and was a bird of music, and song, and taste, and sensibility, and refinement.  While this lasted he was sacred from injury; the very schoolboy would not fling a stone at him, and the merest rustic would pause to listen to his strain.

7.  But mark the difference.  As the year advances, as the clover blossoms disappear, and the spring fades into summer, he gradually gives up his elegant tastes and habits, doffs his poetical suit of black, assumes a russet, dusty garb, and sinks to the gross enjoyment of common vulgar birds.  His notes no longer vibrate on the ear; he is stuffing himself with the seeds of the tall weeds on which he lately swung and chanted so melodiously.  He has become a bon vivant, a gourmand:  with him now there is nothing like the “joys of the table.”  In a little while he grows tired of plain, homely fare, and is off on a gastronomic tour in quest of foreign luxuries.