I am about as large as a robin, and although there is nothing brilliant in my plumage I am not a homely bird. I like the songs of other birds and sometimes sing them. I frequently sing like my cousins, the catbirds and robins and thrushes. But I have my own song, which is unlike all the others. My mate and I build a large nest of small sticks, pieces of string, cotton, and weeds, in thick bushes or low trees. We have five eggs that are greenish blue and spotted with brown. We eat many beetles, larvae, and many kinds of insects which we find feeding upon plants. The worst enemy we have is man. He steals our children almost before we have taught them to sing, and puts them in cages. He is a monster. Many poems have been written about me. One of the finest is by Sidney Lanier, in which he calls me "yon trim Shakespeare on the tree." Any one who has heard my song can never forget me. What is my name? 7. Bird facts and proverbs form a valuable part of a program and may be given by some of the children. Let the pupils search for them and bring some similar to these:-- Birds flock together in hard times. A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. The American robin is not the same bird as the English. The bluebird and robin may be harbingers of spring, but the swallow is the harbinger of summer. The dandelion tells me to look for the swallow; the dog-toothed violet when to expect the wood thrush.--JOHN BURROUGHS. It is not thought that any one bird spends the year in one locality, but that all birds migrate, if only within a limited range. A loon was caught, by a set line for fishing, sixty-five feet below the surface of a lake in New York, having dived to that depth for a fish. The wood pewee, like its relative, the phoebe, feeds largely on the family of flies to which the house fly belongs. The birds of prey, the majority of which labor night and day to destroy the enemies of the husbandman, are unceasingly persecuted. Seventy-five per cent of the food of the downy woodpecker is insects. The cow blackbird lays its eggs in other birds' nests, one in a nest. What happens afterwards? Why should not a man love a bird? If the palm of one could clasp the pinion of the other, there would come together two of the greatest implements God and nature have ever given any two creatures to explore the world with, and when two bipeds gaze at each other, eye to eye, the intelligence in the one might well take off its hat to the subtle instincts in the other.--JAMES NEWTON BASKETT.