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The most interesting experience in several years of bird-study was a trip to a Southern State for the purpose of making acquaintance with the mocking-bird. Adventures began before the lights of New York sank below the horizon; adventures more strange than agreeable, for the journey was by steamer.

"Well, this steamboat had on board a miscellaneous lot of passengers, including a bird-study club, a fife and drum corps, and two scissors-grinders. It wasn't until the boat was wrecked in a thick fog, and they tried to exist on Pelican Point for four days, foggy all the time that they found out what it was going to be like. The Point is cut off from the mainland in bad weather, you know.

They had been too lazy or too indifferent to step ten feet on one side into the thicker copse, and leave the pretty path in its beauty, and the mischief was done, and after all it was not my business. I passed on. Bird-study has other annoyances in that part of the world beside the human beings of whom I have spoken. Next, perhaps, are the sufferings which wring the heart all the while.

During two months' bird-study in that delightful cañon-hidden grove at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain, one particular bird song was for weeks an unsolved mystery. The strain consisted of three notes in loud, ringing tones, which syllabled themselves very plainly in my ear as "Whip-for-her."

There followed upon this rough voyage weeks of quiet, delightful bird-study, whose long sunny-days were passed in the fragrant depths of pine groves, under arching forest of sweet-gum trees, or on the shore of the salt marsh; but wherever, or however, always following and spying out the ways of the feathered world. The bird of the South the mocking-bird, was the first object of study.

In our quiet walk back through the dark woods I accepted my evident fate, that I was not to be blessed with hermit music this season; but I made a private resolve to find next year a "hermit neighborhood," where birds should be warranted to sing, if I had to take a tent and camp out in a swamp. June passed away in delightful bird-study, and July followed quickly.