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The rain had ceased, but the branches still dripped and the air was of an incomparable sweetness. Blackbirds and thrushes on the lawns, and in the thicket-depths were singing as though their lives hung upon the full fresh utterance of each note. A clear pure light was diffused across the world.

"Yet it is most annoying," he said; "I had been quieter in James's Court." Still he smiled a little to himself, for the broom did not grow in James's Court, nor the blackbirds flute their mellow whistle there. Loch Grannoch stretched away three miles to the south, basking in alternate blue and white, as cloud and sky mirrored themselves upon it.

"My good fellow," said the doctor, "if I choose to take my nephew with me upon a natural history expedition " "Natural history expedition! Catching blackbirds! Oh, I say!"

The moose calves and all the small game were taken with Beatrice's pistol. Sometimes he took ptarmigan those whistling, sprightly grouse of the high steeps and Beatrice served uncounted numbers of them, like the famous blackbirds, baked in a pie.

Now it is curious that the sparrows and blackbirds, yellowhammers and greenfinches, that roost in the bushes, fly into the net and are easily captured, but the starlings thanks to their different ways in daylight always fly out at the top of the bush, and so escape. A black cannon ball lies in a garden, an ornament like a shell or a fossil, among blue lobelia and green ferns.

When, therefore, the sun was just above the center of the forest, the girl set out on her way with a bowl of soup, but the field-sparrows, and wood-sparrows, larks and finches, blackbirds and siskins had picked up the millet long before, and the girl could not find the track. Then trusting to chance, she went on and on, until the sun sank and night began to fall.

Half the thrushes and blackbirds along this countryside 'll be dead before this snow gives out. 'Oh, I will go back at once and do that, said Nan, readily. 'Look how they've been running about all the morning, said this fresh-coloured, dark-eyed woman, regarding the traceries on the snow at her feet. 'Most of them larks you can see the spur. And that's a rook with his big heavy claws.

Not a word was spoken, the men keeping still and walking as if awestricken along by the great green bank, startling the velvet-coated blackbirds, which flew out on either side and skimmed along near the great flowery ditch, and passed over the top a hundred yards ahead.

Naturally the cutting of forests, clearing of brush and drainage of marshes is more or less calamitous to all the species of birds that inhabit such places and find there winter food and shelter. Red-winged blackbirds and real estate booms can not inhabit the same swamps contemporaneously.

One of our July days was spent with two Scotch boys of our own age hunting redwing blackbirds then busy in the corn-fields. Our party had only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest and perhaps because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of carrying.