tains where live t 

Rney to a distant town on some business that gave him much bother

and vexation, and that on his way back home, forlorn and dejected, he
suddenly heard the

larks singing all about him,--soaring and singing, just as they did
about his father's fields, and it
comforted him and cheered him up amazingly.
Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences from
their own lives. Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the birds. I
go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,--to plant myself
upon unfamiliar ground. I know nobody, and nobody knows me. The roads,

the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods, are all strange. I look
wistfully upon them, but they know me
not. They give back nothing to my yearning
gaze. But there, on every hand, are the long-familiar birds,--the same
ones I left behind me, the same ones I knew in my youth,--robins,
sparrows, swallows, bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes, meadowlarks,
all there before me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the old
associations. Before my house is begun, theirs is completed; before I
have taken root at all, they

are thoroughly established. I do not yet know what kind of apples my
apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity of a decayed limb, the
bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on that branch, the social
sparrow is busy with hairs and straws. The robins have tasted the
quality of my cherries, and the cedar-birds have known every red cedar
on the place these many
years. While my house is
yet surrounded by its scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has built her
exquisite mossy nest on a projecting
stone beneath the eaves, a robin has filled a niche in the wall with
mud and dry grass, the chimney swallows are going out and in the
chimney, and a pair of house wrens are at home in a snug cavity over
the door, and, during an April snowstorm, a number of hermit thrushes
have taken shelter in my unfinished
chambers. Indeed, I am in the midst of friends before I fairly
know it. The place is not so new as I had thought. It is already old;
the birds have supplied the memories of many
decades of years. There is something almost pathetic in the fact that
the birds remain forever the
same. You grow old,
your friends die or move to distant lands, events sweep on, and all
things are changed. Yet there in your