The wood thrush has a habit of marking his nest with some patch or shred of white, perhaps so that when he comes back from his twilight song he may find it the more readily. Usually the mark is a bit of paper, or a scrap of cloth, on which the nest is set. Last winter I was walking across a frozen marsh where in late summer the blue blind gentian hides. The long tow-colored grass of the tussocks streamed out before a stinging wind which howled at me like a wolf. I crept through thickets to the centre of a little wood, until I was safe from its fierce fingers among the close-set tree-trunks. There I found the last-year's nest of a wood thrush built on a bit of bleached newspaper. Pulling out the paper, I read on it in weather-faded letters, "Votes for Women!" There was no doubt in my mind that the head of that house was a thrushigist. That is probably the reason too why Father Thrush takes his turn on the eggs. Once in the depths of a swamp in the Pocono Mountains I was hunting for the nests of the northern water thrush, which is a wood-warbler and not a thrush at all. That temperamental bird always chooses peculiarly disagreeable morasses for his home. In the roots of an overturned tree by the side of the deepest and most stagnant pool that he can conveniently find, his nest is built, unlike his twin-brother, the Louisiana water thrush, who chooses the bank of some lonely stream. On that day, while ploughing through mud and water and mosquitoes, I came upon a wood thrush's nest beautifully lined with dry green moss, with a scrap of snowy birch-bark for its marker. The song of the wood thrush is a strain of woodwind notes, few in number, but inexpressibly true, mellow, and assuaging. "Cool bars of melody--the liquid coolness of a deep spring," is how they sounded to Thoreau. "Air--o--e, air-o-u," with a rising inflection on the "e" and a falling cadence on the "u," is perhaps an accurate phrasing of the notes. Many of our singers give a more elaborate performance. The brown thrasher, that grand-opera singer who loves a tree-top and an audience, has a more brilliant song. Yet there are few listeners who will prefer his florid, conscious style to the simple, appealing notes of the wood thrush. Although his is perhaps the most beautiful strain in our everyday chorus, to me the wood thrush does not rank with either the veery or the hermit. His song lacks the veery's magic and the ethereal quality of the hermit, and is marred by occasional grating bass-notes.