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Squirrels barked at us from the trees; coveys of young partridges ran rustling over the leaves below, and the golden oriole, the blue jay, and the flaming red-bird darted among the shadowy branches. We hailed these sights and sounds of beauty by no means with an unmingled pleasure.

By day the cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed mocking-bird of America.

In a few days is it not so? through the green masses of the trees will flash the orange of the oriole, the scarlet of the tanager; perhaps tomorrow. But, in fact, the next day opens a little sourly. It is almost clear overhead: but the clouds thicken on the horizon; they look leaden; they threaten rain. It certainly will rain: the air feels like rain, or snow.

These green walks, where the nightingale and the oriole were singing, were otherwise as quiet as the Eveche itself; but the acme of quiet and solitude was only to be found in the avenue of yews, called Bossuet's Walk.

The whole great top was yellow with the gaudy cups, each gleaming "like a flake of fire," as Dr. Holmes says of the oriole. Some of them were nearly four inches across. Last year a small tree, growing in a garden near where I write, bloomed for the first time. It was about twenty years old. Its flowers were paler and shallower than those gathered at the same time in the woods.

He explained coldly that Henry and he had grown tired of the printing-press and had decided to put in all their spare time building a theatre in Henry's attic; but Florence gave him to understand that the theatre could not be; she preferred the Oriole.

"When I saw the Oriole," she wrote to me, "from his nest among the plum-trees in the garden, sail over the air and high above the Gothic arches of the elm, a stream of flashing light, or watched him swinging silently on pendent twigs, I did not dream how near akin we were.

That is to say, there is a political instinct in him which causes him to organize political societies and make laws; he is a state builder in the same way that the beaver is a dam builder, or the oriole is a nest builder, or the bee is a comb builder. With equal truth we may say that man is a religious animal.

He did not seem to have any special plan of attack, like the kingbird or the oriole; his aim appeared to be merely to worry the enemy, and in this he was untiring, flying madly and without pause around a perching crow until he took flight, and then attempting to rise above him.

"The Baltimore Oriole is not so shy as his brother, and rather relies on keeping his nest out of sight than himself out of mind. His home is a sort of hempen hammock, only deeper and more pocket-shaped, to keep the babies from falling out, as Nat and Dodo both did out of our hammock yesterday." "This nest Mrs.