The bird that to my mind is distinctly the advance agent of summer has well been called the summer tanager. He delays his coming until straw hats and linen suits appear; then what a dash of warm color he brings. Seated on the topmost bough of a tall oak, where the sun’s rays fall full upon him, he gives such intense, palpitating color that one’s eyes are almost blinded looking at him. Rich as is the red of the cardinal it appears soiled and tarnished beside the summer tanager. With a sigh we realize that the spring migration is over for this year; but there is one consolation, only a part of its music is hushed—the soul of Southern bird life, the mocking bird, is left. Inconspicuous by reason of his Quaker-gray suit, he makes up in attractive manners and variety of musical gifts what he lacks in other respects. It is quite impossible to do justice to this bird either in describing his bubbling, effervescent life during the nesting season or in giving an adequate idea of the effect produced upon the senses by his exquisitely beautiful nocturnes. One March night some noise just outside my window awakened me. I arose and raising the window listened. The full moon, almost in the zenith, was flooding the landscape with a weird, soft light; the shadows of the cedar hedge a few yards away lay black as ink; the very air was heavy with the perfume of the jessamine abloom in a neighboring forest. In the cedars a mocking bird sang to himself a sweet, dreamy song, giving more complete expression to the mystery, the romance, the passion, the rapturous content of a Southern moonlit night than any poem that poet’s hand has ever written. James Stephen Compton. ANTICS OF A HUMMINGBIRD. As the writer was standing one May morning near a clump of bushes in the suburbs of a city in Maine he witnessed, for the first time in a long experience of bird study, the courting antics of a male hummingbird. Two of the tiny creatures appeared, apparently evolved from mid-air, and one alighted in the bush. She was the female. The male immediately began to disport himself in the air in the following remarkable manner: