"With tireless industry do the warblers defend the human race. They visit the orchard when the apple and pear, the peach, plum, and cherry, are in bloom, seeming to revel among the sweet-scented blossoms, but never faltering in their good work. They peer into crevices of the bark, and explore the very heart of the buds, to detect, drag forth, and destroy those tiny creatures which prey upon the hopes of the fruit-grower, and which, if undisturbed, would bring all his care to naught. Some warblers flit incessantly in the tops of the tallest trees, others hug close to the scored trunks and gnarled boughs of the forest kings; some peep from the thickets and shrubbery that deck the watercourses, playing at hide-and-seek; others, more humble still, descend to the ground, where they glide with pretty mincing steps and affected turning of the head this way and that, their delicate flesh-tinted feet just stirring the layer of withered leaves with which a past season carpeted the sod. We may see warblers everywhere in their season and find them a continual surprise." "Sweet and true are the notes of his song: Sweet, and yet always full and strong; True, and yet they are never sad. Serene with that peace that maketh glad; Life! Life! Life! Oh, what a blessing is life! Life is glad." CHAPTER X THE BLUEBIRD He flits through the orchard, he visits each tree. The red-flowering peach, and the apple's sweet blossoms; He snaps up destroyers wherever they be. And seizes the caitiffs that lurk in their bosoms. He drags the vile worm from the corn it devours, The worms from their webs where they riot and welter; His song and his services freely are ours. And all that he asks is, in summer a shelter. Wilson. Yesterday the snow melted from the top of the great rocks in the woods; the evergreens shading the rocks lost their white load that had been bearing down the branches for a month; the fences straggled their lean legs wide apart, as if it were summer, only the tips of their toes resting on the surface snow; the north roof of the barn fringed itself with icicles that tumbled down by noon, sticking up at the base of the barn in the drifts head foremost; the top dressing of white powder that for weeks had adorned the woodpiles sifted down through the sticks in a wet scramble for the bottom. All around the farm the buntings had picked the snow off, making the fields look as if brown mats were spread all over the floor. But yesterday the south wind puckered up its lips and blew all over everything in sight, and the brown mats disappeared, or rather, grew into one big one. The cows in the barn-yard look longingly over the fence toward the pasture, and the fowls take a longer walk than they have dared for months, away out in the garden, where lopping brown vines and nude bush stalks bear witness to what they have suffered. [Illustration: BLUE BIRD.]