but it is like the laugh of irony, the smile that lures to ruin, “Which, hushed in grim repose, awaits his certain prey.” Then comes a ruthless May, with Winter in her train, who, with his frosty edge, unpitying shears away all the expectancies, the beautiful promise of the year; and we have to await returning seasons, and patient hope for better things. A garden pining and prostrate from the effects of a churlish, frosty May, leaves crisp and blackened, flowers withered, torn, and scattered around, are a melancholy sight—the vernal hectic that consumes the fairest offspring of the nursery. There is a plant, however, the white thorn (mespilus oxycanthus), the May of our rustics, common in all places and situations, that affords a good example of general steadiness to time, uninfluenced by partial effects. An observation of above twenty years upon this plant has proved how little it deviates in its blossoming in one season from another; and, under all the importunities and blandishments of the most seductive Aprils, I have in all that period never but twice seen more than a partial blossom by the first of May. We hail our first-seen swallow as a harbinger of milder days and summer enjoyments; but the appearance of our birds of passage is not greatly to be depended upon, as I have reason to apprehend from much observation. They will be accelerated or retarded in the time of their departure by the state of the wind in the country whence they take their flight; they travel much by night, requiring in many instances the light of the moon to direct them; and the actual time of their arrival is difficult to ascertain, as they steal into our hedges and copses unperceived. If the weather be bright or warm, their voices are heard; if gloomy and cold, they will lie secreted till the call of hunger or of love intimates their presence. Though we rarely see these birds in their transits, yet I have at times, on a calm bright evening in November, heard high in the air the redwing and the fieldfare, on progress to a destined settlement, manifested by the signal-notes of some leading birds to their scattered followers. These conductors of their flocks are certainly birds acquainted with the country over which they travel, their settlements here being no promiscuous dispersion: it being obvious that many pairs of birds return to their ancient haunts, either old ones which had bred there, or their offspring. The butcher-bird successively returns to a hedge in one of my fields, influenced by some advantage it derives from that situation, or from a preference to the spot where hatched; but we have perhaps no bird more attached to peculiar situations than the gray flycatcher (muscicapa grisola), one pair, or their descendants, frequenting year after year the same hole in the wall, or the same branch on the vine or the plum. Being perfectly harmless, and hence never molested, they become