I was responsible for the last bird-song which appears on the lists of my three friends--but not on mine. We were to start back for civilization the next morning, and I was walking along the river-bank in the late twilight, while my more industrious and scientific companions were writing up their notes and compiling lists of everything seen and heard on our trip. Through the windows of the gun-room I could see their learned backs as they bent over their compilations. Suddenly the eerie little wail of a screech owl floated up from the river-bank. Curiously enough, it came from the very tree behind which I was crouching. Instantly I saw three backs straighten and three heads peer excitedly out into the darkness. When I at last strolled in half an hour later, they told me excitedly that they had scored the first screech owl ever heard in that particular part of Canada. I never told them. It is not safe to trifle with the feelings of a scientific ornithologist. Undoubtedly my reticence in regard to that particular bird-song is all that has saved me from occupying a lonely grave in upper Canada. * * * * * Sweetest of all the singers, the thrush-folk--what shall I say of them? of the veery, with its magic notes; of the hermit thrush whose song opens the portals of another world; of the dear wood thrush who sings at our door. While these three voices are left in the world, there are recurrent joys that nothing can take from us. It was the veery song that I learned first. More years ago than I like to remember, I walked at sunrise by a thicket, listening to bird-songs and wondering whether there was any way by which I might come to learn the names of the singers. One song rippled out of that thicket that thrilled me with its strange unearthly harp-chords. "Ta-wheela, ta-wheela, ta-wheela," it ran weirdly down the scale, and strangely enough, was at its best at a distance and in the dusk or the early moonlight. I was to learn later that the singer was the veery or Wilson thrush. That was many years ago, but I have loved the bird from that day. Once I found its nest set in the midst of a dark rhododendron swamp; and as the mother bird slipped like a tawny shadow from the wondrous blue eggs gleaming in the dusk, from nearby vibrated the whirling ringing notes of its mate. Again, on a tussock in Wolf Island Marsh I found another; and as both birds fluttered around me with the alarm note, "Pheu, pheu," the father bird whispered a strain of his song, and it was as if the wind had rippled the music from the waving marsh-grasses.