In the midst of it all I heard my comrade’s footfall on the piazza, and gave him a whistle. He came at once, wading through the wet grass in his slippers. He knew from my attitude--so he firmly declared afterward--that it was a Lincoln finch I was gazing at! And just as he drew near, the sparrow, sitting in full view and facing us, in a way to show off his peculiar marks to the best advantage, uttered a single _cheep_, thoroughly distinctive, or at least quite unlike any sparrow’s note with which I am familiar; as characteristic, I should say, as the song sparrow’s _tut_. Then he dropped to the ground. “Yes, I saw him, and heard the note,” my companion said; and he hastened into the house for his boots and his opera-glass. In a few minutes he was back again, fully equipped, and we set ourselves to coax the fellow into making another display of himself. Sure enough, he responded almost immediately, and we had another satisfying observation of him, though this time he kept silence. I was especially interested to find, what I had on general considerations suspected, that Lincoln finches were like other members of their family. Take them right (by themselves, and without startling them to begin with), and they could be as complaisant as one could desire, no matter how timid and elusive they might be under different conditions. Our bird was certainly a jewel. For a while he pleased us by perching side by side with a song sparrow. “You see how much smaller I am,” he might have been saying; “you may know me partly by that.” And we fancied we should know him thereafter; but a novice’s knowledge is only a novice’s, as we were to be freshly reminded that very day. Our jaunt was round Garnet Hill, the all-day expedition before referred to. I will not rehearse the story of it; but while we were on the farther side of the hill, somewhere in Lisbon, we found the roadsides swarming with sparrows,--a mixed flock, song sparrows, field sparrows, chippers, and white-crowns. Among them one of us by and by detected a grayish, smallish bird, and we began hunting him, from bush to bush and from one side of the road to the other, carrying on all the while an eager debate as to his identity. Now we were sure of him, and now everything was unsettled. His breast was streaked and had a yellow band across it. His color and size were right, as well as we could say,--so decidedly so that there was no difficulty whatever in picking him out at a glance after losing him in a flying bunch; but some of his motions were pretty song-sparrow-like, and what my fellow observer was most staggered by, he showed a blotch, a running together of the dark streaks, in the middle of the breast,--a point very characteristic of the song sparrow, but not mentioned in book descriptions of Melospiza lincolni. So we chased him and discussed him (that was the time for a gun, the professional will say), till he got away from us for good.