The mountain vireo (_Vireo solitarius alticola_), like the Carolina snowbird, may properly be called a native of Highlands; and, like the snowbird, it proved to be common. My first sight of it was in the hotel yard, but I found it--single pairs--everywhere. A look at the feathers of the back through an opera-glass showed at once the principal distinction--apart from a superiority in size, not perceptible at a distance--on which its subspecific identity is based; but though to its original describer its song sounded very much finer than the northern bird’s, I could not bring myself to the same conclusion. I should never have remarked in it anything out of the common. Once, to be sure, I heard notes which led me to say, “There! that voice is more like a yellow-throat’s,--fuller and rounder than a typical solitary’s;” but that might have happened anywhere, and at all other times; although I had the point continually in mind, I could only pronounce the song to be exactly what my ear was accustomed to,--sweet and everything that was beautiful, but a solitary vireo’s song, and nothing else. And this, to my thinking, is praise enough. There is no bird-song within my acquaintance that excels the solitary’s in a certain intimate expressiveness, affectionateness, home-felt happiness, and purity. Not that it has all imaginable excellencies,--the unearthly, spiritual quality of the best of our woodland thrush music, for example; but such as it is, an utterance of love and love’s felicity, it leaves nothing to ask for. What a contrast between it and the red-eye’s comparatively meaningless and feelingless music! And yet, so far as mere form is concerned, the two songs may be considered as built upon the same model, if not variations of the same theme. There must be a world-wide difference between the two species, one would say, in the matter of character and temperament.