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At this season they feed on insects instead of berries, and may be looked for in small flocks in orchard or wood. The period of nesting is usually late, and, in company with the goldfinches, they do not begin their housekeeping until July and August.
As the grass on the plot before our house did not form a fine even turf, the ground was trenched and sown with good seed, but along with the grass a vast crop of thistles and groundsel appeared, which attracted quantities of goldfinches, and in the early mornings I have seen as many as sixty to eighty of these beautiful birds feeding on it.
In his earlier poems he was under the influence of the Provençal Troubadours, and in his "Flower and the Leaf," and other works of a similar class, he riots in allegory; he represents the cardinal virtues walking about in human shape; his forests are full of beautiful ladies with coronals on their heads; courts of love are held beneath the spreading elm, and metaphysical goldfinches and nightingales, perched among the branches green, wrangle melodiously about the tender passion.
For one thing we like thistledown to line our nest, and there isn't any thistledown yet. Then, there is no sense in raising a family until there is plenty of the right kind of food, and you know we Goldfinches live mostly on seeds. I'll venture to say that we are the greatest seed-eaters anywhere around.
"Only keep your eyes open and work hard," cried Doris. "It is of no use without luck," muttered the singer, shrugging his shoulders. The young artist bid his parents good-night, and was about to leave, but his mother detained him to show him the young goldfinches, hatched only the day before.
No one but Georgiana herself would ever be able to tell what it was that I might wish to lift up to her at any time; and in case of its being not a note, but a plum a berry a peach it would be as safe as it was unseen. This old house of a pair of goldfinches would thus become the home of our fledgling hopes: every day a new brood of vows would take flight across its rim into our bosoms.
It led them into new, unexplored nooks of the woods, past a red-poll nest, and where goldfinches prospected for thistledown for the cradles they would line a little later. It led them into real forest, where deep, dark pools lay, where the hermit thrush and the wood robin extracted the essence from all other bird melody, and poured it out in their pure bell-tone notes.
In winter there were hunters of yellow-hammers and goldfinches in these regions, who set their nets and their decoys on the ground, and spent hours and hours watching for their game. On Sunday, in particular, the number of hunters was very large.
But in spite of her argument Nat and Rap continued to laugh. "It must be hard to tell them when they lose their yellow feathers," said Nat finally. "No; Goldfinches keep up a habit by which you can always tell them, old or young, male or female, in summer or winter. Can you guess what it is?" "I know! Oh, I know!" cried Rap. "They always fly with a dip and a jerk." The American Goldfinch
He was dressed in a shabby cap and dressing-gown belonging to a confectioner long dead, whom he had known when a boy. Mysterious as it all was, there was yet something natural in this meeting with his friend. The little shop was alive with goldfinches. "They are the goldfinches," Rasmussen explained, "that settled in the Heuscheuer Mountains last winter, you know, and were fatal to me."
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