Yet if I said so, it was only in a fit of impatience. In point of fact, I received with thankfulness every such bit of evidence that Dr. ----’s gloomy prognostications were ill founded. On the very morning after this expedition to Whiteside, for example, I was on my way to the summit of Satulah,--an easy jaunt, and a capital observatory,--when I met a young man carrying a gun, and proposed to him the inevitable inquiry. Oh yes, he saw ravens pretty often; he had seen some within a month, he thought. They never flew over without calling out; which, as I interpreted it, might mean only that when they kept silence he failed to notice them. Here was more proof of the birds’ presence; but the words “within a month” kept down any tendency to undue exhilaration. That noon, at the hotel, I had an interesting ornithological conference with two residents of the town, both of them already well informed as to the nature of my crotchet. For a beginning, one of them told me that he had seen a raven that very forenoon,--and as usual it was “flying over.” Then the talk somehow turned upon the whippoorwill, of which I had thus far found no trace hereabout, and they agreed that it was not uncommon at certain seasons. It was often called the bullbat, they added. They had seen it, both of them, I think, flying far up in the air in broad daylight, and crying _whippoorwill_! “Good!” said I. “I would rather have seen that than all the ravens in North Carolina.” Here was a really novel addition to the familiar legend about the identity of the whippoorwill and the night-hawk,--a legend whose distribution is perhaps almost as wide as that of the birds themselves. But wonders were not to stop here. One of the men, the one who had that forenoon seen a raven, proceeded to inform me that catbirds passed the winter in the mud, in a state of hibernation. William ---- had dug them up, and they had come to and flown away. He himself had never seen this, but he knew, as everybody else did, that catbirds disappeared in the autumn, there was no telling how or when, and reappeared in the spring in a manner equally mysterious. I hinted some incredulity, to his great surprise, intimating for one thing that it was well known that catbirds migrated farther south; whereupon he appealed to his companion. “Wouldn’t you believe it, if William ---- told you he had seen it?” he asked; and there was a shout of laughter from the bystanders when the second man, after a minute’s reflection, answered bluntly, “No.”