Through the dripping boughs I pressed far into the very centre of the wood. In a tangle of greenbrier sounded a series of sharp irritating chips, and a cardinal, blood-red against the leaden sky, perched himself on a bough of a hornbeam sapling. As I watched him sitting there in the cold rain, he seemed like some bird of the tropics which had flamed his way north and would soon go back to the blaze of sun and riot of color where he belonged. Yet the cardinal grosbeak stays with us all winter, and I have seen four of the vivid males at a time, all crimson against the white snow. To-day he looked down upon me, and without any warning suddenly began to sing his full song in a whisper. "Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl," he whistled with a mellow and wood-wind note; and again, a full tone lower, "Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl." Then he sang a lilting double-note song, "Chu-wee, chu-wee, chu-wee," ending with a ringing whistle, "Whit, whit, whit, teu, teu, teu," and then ran them together, "Whit-teu, whit-teu, whit-teu." As his lovely dove-colored mate flitted jealously through the thicket, he tactfully and smackingly cried, "Kiss, kiss, kiss," and dived into the bushes to join her. Again and again he ran through his little repertoire, so low that thirty feet away he could hardly be heard. Leaden clouds and dank mists might cover the earth, but life would always be worth the living so long as one could find snatches of jeweled songs like that sung to me by the cardinal. As I started homeward under the dripping sky, crimson against the dark green of a cedar tree, my friend called his good-bye to me in one last long ringing note. Late that afternoon the rain stopped, the clouds rolled back, and in the west the sky was a mass of flame, with pools of sapphire-blue and rose-red cloud. Above, in a stretch of pure cool apple-green, floated the newest of new moons. As the after-glow ebbed, one by one all the wondrous tints merged into a great band of amber that barred the dark for long. Just before it faded in the last moments of the twilight, there shuddered across the evening air the sweetest, saddest note that can be heard in all winter music. It was a tremolo, wailing little cry that always makes me think of the children the pyxies stole, who can be heard now and again in the twilight, or before dawn, calling, calling vainly for one long gone. In the dim light in a nearby tree, I could see the ear-tufts of the little red-brown screech-owl. Like the beat of unseen wings, his voice trembled again and again through the air, and answering him, I called him up to within six feet of me. Around and around my head he flew like a great moth, his soft muffled wings making not the faintest breath of sound, until at last he drifted away into the dark.