Early on a bright morning I was following one of the streets of the village, when, on reaching the suburbs, I was greeted by a blithe, dulcet trill which could come from no other vocalist than the song-sparrow. His tones and vocalization were precisely like those of _Melospiza fasciata_, to which I have so often listened in my native State of Ohio. It was a dulcet strain, and stirred memories half sad, half glad, of many a charming ramble about my eastern home when the song-sparrows were the chief choralists in the outdoor opera festival. Peering into the bushes that fringed the gurgling mountain brook, I soon caught sight of the little triller, and found that, so far as I could distinguish them with my field-glass, his markings were just like those of his eastern relative--the same mottled breast, with the large dusky blotch in the centre. Delighted as I was with the bird's aria, I could not decide whether this was the common song-sparrow or the mountain song-sparrow. Something over a week earlier I had seen what I took to be the mountain song-sparrow in a green nook below the summit of Pike's Peak, and had noted his trill as a rather shabby performance in comparison with the tinkling chansons of the song-sparrow of the East. Had I mistaken some other bird for the mountain song-sparrow? Or was the Buena Vista bird the common song-sparrow which had gone entirely beyond its Colorado range? Consulting Professor W. W. Cooke's list of Colorado birds, I found that _Melospiza fasciata_ is marked "migratory, rare," and has been known thus far only in the extreme eastern part of the State; whereas _Melospiza fasciata montana_ is a summer resident, "common throughout the State in migration, and not uncommon as a breeder from the plains to eight thousand feet." But Professor Cooke fails to give a clue to the song of either variety, and therefore my little problem remains unsolved, as I could not think of taking the life of a dulcet-voiced bird merely to discover whether it should have "_montana_" affixed to its scientific name or not. All I can say is, if this soloist was a mountain song-sparrow, he reproduced exactly the trills of his half-brothers of the East.[7] On the morning of my departure from Buena Vista another song-sparrow sang his matins, in loud, clear tones among the bushes of a stream that flowed through the town, ringing quite a number of changes in his tune, all of them familiar to my ear from long acquaintance with the eastern forms of the _Melospiza_ subfamily. [7] The problem has since been solved, through the aid of Mr. Aiken. The Buena Vista bird was _montana_, while the bird in the Pike's Peak hollow was Lincoln's sparrow.