stroll along the lawn-fence.  Her ways are not as the ways of other wrens.  She has a somewhat different style of diving into the ivy and exploring the syringa.  A new generation of doves has grown up since the lilacs were in bloom, and nothing is easier than to distinguish the old and young of the two or three separate families till all leave the grass and the gravel together and hie to the stubble-fields beyond our ken.  Of the one mocking bird who made night hideous by his masterly imitations of the screaking of a wheel-barrow (regreased at an early period in self-defence) and the wheezy bark of Beppo, the superannuated St. Bernard, there could of course be no doubt.  There was none of his kind to compare him with—­not even a mate, for “sexual selection” could not possibly operate in face of so inharmonious a love-song.  His isolation had its parallel in the one white guinea-fowl that haunted the shrubbery like a ghost, much more silent and placid than it would have been in society, and its antitype in the hennery, where individuality of course ran riot among the Brahmas, Dominicas and Hamburgs—­hens that would and would not lay, that would and would not set, that would and would not scratch up seeds, and presented generally as great a variety of vagaries as of feathers.  So, when we turned our back at last on lovely Boscobel, itself shut out, as the common phrase goes, “from the world” by serried ramparts of maple, elm, acacia and catalpa, we knew well that that enceinte of leafage enclosed many little worlds of its own—­winged microcosms, epicycles of the grand cycle of dateless life which man in his humility assumes to be merely a subsidiary appendage of his own orbit.

Birds should be studied seriously.  The naturalists will tell us more about them, and interest us more, than the poets.  Mr. Bryant makes fun of the bobolink, and turns into an aimless whistle the solemn oration on domestic matters uttered by that small but energetic American to his mate.  The waterfowl he treats more gravely and respectfully, but he still makes it only a part of the landscape and the theme, without ascribing any intelligent purpose to its flight.  The bird, proceeding steadily and calmly to its business, may well have confounded its versifier with his fellow the fowler, and looked upon him, too, as regretting only that it was out of gunshot.  Audubon or Wilson would have noted more sensibly the floating figure, far above “falling dew,” and the earth-bound mortal who was evidently afraid of rheumatics and calculating whether he could walk home before dark.  The bird, they would have been perfectly aware, was neither “wandering” nor “lost,” and no more in need of the special interposition of a protecting Providence than they or Mr. Bryant.  They would infer its motives, its point of departure and its destination, the character of the friends it left behind or sought—­whether it was carrying out a plan of the day or bound on an expedition covering half the year.  Its species would have