Quite recently I read a journal that a young minister kept, back in the fifties. One entry especially appealed to me. "Decided this morning that I was not the right man for this church. Chopped wood for two hours in Colonel Hewitt's wood-lot. Decided that this was the church for me and that I was the man for this church." On this particular morning, I heard once more the wild dawn-song of the Carolina wren, full of liquid bell-like overtones. As I listened, my mind went back to another wren-song. I had been hunting for the nest of a yellow palm warbler in a little gully in the depths of a northern forest. The blood ran down my face from the fierce bites of the black-flies, and the mosquitoes stung like fire. Suddenly, from the side of the tiny ravine, began a song full of ringing, glassy notes such as one makes by running a wet finger rapidly on the inside of a thin glass finger-bowl. Listening, I forgot that I was wet and tired and hungry and bitten and stung. For the first time I listened to the song of the winter wren. For years I had met this little bird along the sides of brooks in the winter and running in and out of holes and under stones like a mouse; but to-day to me it was no longer a tiny bird. It was the voice of the untamed, unknown northern woods. It is hard to make any notation of the song. It flowed like some ethereal stream filled with little bubbles of music which broke in glassy tinkling sprays of sound over the under-current of the high vibrating melody itself. The song seemed to have two parts. The first ended in a contralto phrase, while the second soared like a fountain into a spray of tinkling trills. Through it all ran a strange unearthly dancing lilt, such as the fairy songs must have had, heard by wandering shepherds at the edge of the green fairy hills. At its very height the melody suddenly ceased, and once again I dropped back into a workaday, mosquito-ridden world, with ten miles between me and my camp. On that day I found two of the almost unknown, feather-lined nests of the yellow palm warbler, and climbed up to the jewel-casket of a bay-breasted warbler, and was shown the cherished secret of a Nashville warbler's nest deep hidden in the sphagnum moss of a little tussock in the middle of a pathless morass. Yet my great adventure was the song of the winter wren.