Ridgway says: "Tanagers are splendid; Humming-birds are refulgent; other kinds are brilliant, gaudy or magnificent, but Warblers alone are pretty in the proper and full sense of that term. When the apple trees bloom, the Warblers revel among the flowers, vieing in activity and in number with the bees; now probing the recesses of a blossom for an insect which has effected lodgment there, then darting to another, where, poised daintily upon a slender twig, or suspended from it, he explores hastily but carefully for another morsel. Every movement is the personification of nervous activity, as if the time for their journey was short; and, indeed, such appears to be the case, for two or three days at most suffice some species in a single locality; a day spent in gleaning through the woods and orchards of one neighborhood, with occasional brief siestas among the leafy bowers, then the following night in continuous flight toward its northern destination, is probably the history of every individual of the moving throng." "Have you walked beneath the blossoms in the spring? In the spring? Beneath the apple blossoms in the spring? When the pink cascades are falling, And the silver brooklets bawling, And the Warbler bird soft calling, In the spring?" ---- BIRD SUPERSTITIONS AND WINGED PORTENTS. THE superstitions of the peasant folk of any country are not only interesting with thought, feeling, and belief, says an intelligent writer, but through them much of the inner history of a people can often be traced. Ireland is peculiarly rich in these forgivable vagaries about birds. They often seem of a very savage and grewsome character, but as we come to know that however grim-visaged the face of one confiding the weird assertion of uncanny belief, that secretly the masses of the peasantry scout and flout them all, save those of a tender and winsome character, we become reconciled to it. Thus the quaint and weird things which might seem unaccountable and often repulsive to us, have become, in lieu of book lore, a folk and fireside lore, out of which endless entertainment is secured; and underneath much of this there is a deep and earnest tenderness, such as all hearts know, for many things without apparent reason, that grow into life and ancestry, oft repeated homeside tale, beloved custom and that mysterious hallowing which comes upon changeless places and objects to men.