It was under quite different circumstances that I last heard the best winter singer of all. Never was there a more discouraging day for a collector of bird-songs. The year was dying of rheumy age. On the trees still hung a few dank, blotched leaves, while the sodden ground plashed under foot and a leaden mist of rain covered everything. Yet at the edge of the very first field that I started to cross, a strange call cut through the fog, and I glimpsed a large black-and-white bird crossing the meadow with the dipping up-and-down flight of a woodpecker. It was the hairy woodpecker, the big brother of the more common downy, and a bird that usually loves the depths of the woods. Hardly had it alighted on a wild-cherry tree, when an English sparrow flew up from a nearby ash-dump and attacked the new comer. The harassed woodpecker flew to the next tree and the next, but was driven on and away each time by the sparrow, until finally, with another rattling call, it flew back to the woods from whence it had come. A moment later a starling alighted on the same tree, unmolested by its compatriot. [Illustration: THE JUNCO ON HIS WATCH TOWER] I followed the fields to a nearby patch of woods. It is small and bounded on all sides by crowded roads, but at all times of the year I find birds there. As I reached the edge of the trees white-skirted juncos flew up in front of me. Mingled with their sharp notes, like the clicking of pebbles, came the gentle whisper of the white-throated sparrow, and from a nearby thicket one of them gave its strange minor song. For its length I know of no minor strain in bird-music that is sweeter. Like the little silver flute-trill of the pink-beaked field sparrow, and the lovely contralto notes of the bluebird who from mid-sky calls down, "Faraway, faraway, faraway," the song of the white-throated sparrow is tantalizingly brief and simple in its phrasing. Up in Canada the guides call the bird the "widow-woman." Usually its song, except in the spring, is incomplete and apt to flatten a little on some of the notes; but today it rang through the rain as true and compelling as when it wakes me, from the syringa and lilac bushes outside my sleeping-porch, some May morning.