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I say "near:" it was near "as the crow flies," but for one without wings it may have been half a mile; for between me and that spot was a great gulf fixed, the rallying point of the most erratic of wandering streamlets, and so given over to its vagaries that no bird-gazer, however enthusiastic, and indifferent to wet feet and draggled garments, dared attempt to pass.
Ordinarily I call myself a simple bird-gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but on occasions like the present I assume with myself, that is all the rights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictly so called. In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence and picked my way across the field.
"How did they look?" said I. "They is red blackbirds," he returned. This was not the first time I had heard the redwing called the ricebird. But how did the boy know me for a bird-gazer? That was a mystery. It came over me all at once that possibly I had become better known in the community than I had in the least suspected; and then I remembered my field-glass.
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