I asked him if he ever heard that rare piece of bird music, the flight song of the oven-bird. "Yes," he replied, "we frequently hear it of an evening, while we are sitting on the porch, right down there at the corner of the woods." Now, this flight song of the oven-bird was unknown to the older ornithologists, and Thoreau, with all his years of patient and tireless watching of birds and plants, never identified it; but the President had caught it quickly and easily, sitting on his porch at Sagamore Hill. I believe I may take the credit of being the first to identify and describe this song--back in the old "Wake Robin" days. In an inscription in a book the President had just given me he had referred to himself as my pupil. Now I was to be his pupil. In dealing with the birds I could keep pace with him pretty easily, and, maybe, occasionally lead him; but when we came to consider big game and the animal life of the globe, I was nowhere. His experience with the big game has been very extensive, and his acquaintance with the literature of the subject is far beyond my own; and he forgets nothing, while my memory is a sieve. In his study he set before me a small bronze elephant in action, made by the famous French sculptor Barye. He asked me if I saw anything wrong with it. I looked it over carefully, and was obliged to confess that, so far as I could see, it was all right. Then he placed before me another, by a Japanese artist. Instantly I saw what was wrong with the Frenchman's elephant. Its action was like that of a horse or a cow, or any trotting animal--a hind and a front foot on opposite sides moving together. The Japanese had caught the real movement of the animal, which is that of a pacer--both legs on the same side at a time. What different effects the two actions gave the statuettes! The free swing of the Japanese elephant you at once recognize as the real thing. The President laughed, and said he had never seen any criticism of Barye's elephant on this ground, or any allusion to his mistake; it was his own discovery. I was fairly beaten at my own game of observation. He then took down a copy of his "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," and pointed out to me the mistakes the artist had made in some of his drawings of big Western game. "Do you see anything wrong in the head of the pronghorn?" he asked, referring to the animal which the hunter is bringing in on the saddle behind him. Again I had to confess that I could not. Then he showed me the mounted head of a pronghorn over the mantel in one of his rooms, and called my attention to the fact that the eye was close under the root of the horn, whereas in the picture the artist had placed it about two inches too low. And in the artist's picture of the pronghorn, which heads Chapter IX, he had made the tail much too long, as he had the tail of the elk on the opposite page.