The fact is, a sparrow is a boy when it comes to eating. Were it not for its good appetite, it couldn't put up with "just anything." Sparrows love the towns and cities because they find crumbs there. Our friend the baker knows them, and many a meal do they find ready spread at his back door. So does Bridget the cook, and even Lung Wo, if their hearts happen to have a soft place for the birds. As for the boy around the corner, who walks about on crutches, he knows all about the sparrows' preferences. In fact, sparrows seem to have a special liking for boys on crutches. One little fellow we knew used to lay his crutch down flat on the ground and place food up and down on it when the sparrows were hungry in the morning. And the crutch came to be the "family board," around which the birds gathered, be the crutch laid flat or tilted aslant on the doorstep. In this way Johnny of the crippled foot came to have a good understanding with the birds, and many a quiet hour was spent in their company. Johnny may turn out to be a great ornithologist some day, all on account of his crutch. What will it matter that he may never shoulder a gun and wander off to the woods to shoot "specimens"? His knowledge of bird ways will serve a better purpose than a possible gun. It was Johnny who first told us to notice how a sparrow straddles his little stick legs far apart when he walks, spreading his toes in a comical way. Eastern and Western song-sparrows differ, and so do individual birds everywhere--not only in their songs, but in the distribution of specks and stripes on their clothes. What we have said about our song-sparrows may not wholly apply to the family elsewhere. These differences lead bird-lovers to study each of the birds about his own door and forests without placing too much credit upon what others say. There is much of the year when sparrows live almost solely on seeds, and this is the time when they join hands with the farmer, so to speak, and help him with the thistles and other weeds, by work at the seed tufts and pods. Sparrows love to run in and out of holes and cracks and between cornstalks and dry woodpiles. It was this habit of peeping into everything, on the part of the birds, that led the olden poet to write: "I love the sparrows' ways to watch Upon the cotter's sheds. So here and there pull out the thatch That they may hide their heads." It was a pretty idea and a charitable one, that of the poet's. In a country where roofs are shingled with thatch, or dry sticks and leaves overlapping, the sparrows are familiar residents; and where somebody remembers to "pull out the thatch" or make a loose little corner on purpose, they sleep all night. We have ourselves made many a pile of brush on purpose for the sparrows.