There were many more birds here now than I had found six or seven weeks before; but there was much less music. In early August hermit thrushes sang in sundry places and at all hours; now a faint _chuck_ was the most that we heard from them, and that but once. And still our September vacation was far from being a silent one. Song sparrows, vesper sparrows, white-throats, goldfinches, robins, solitary vireos, chickadees (whose whistle is among the sweetest of wild music, I being judge), phœbes, and a catbird, all these sang more or less frequently, and more or less well, though all except the goldfinches and the chickadees were noticeably out of voice. Once a grouse drummed, and once a flicker called _hi, hi_, just as in springtime; and every warm day set the hylas peeping. Once, too, a ruby-crowned kinglet sang for us with all freedom, and once a gold-crest. The latter’s song is a very indifferent performance, hardly to be called musical in any proper sense of the word; nothing but his ordinary _zee-zee-zee_, with a hurried, jumbled, ineffective coda; yet it suggests, and indeed is much like, a certain few notes of the ruby-crown’s universally admired tune. The two songs are evidently of a common origin, though the ruby-crown’s is so immeasurably superior that one of my friends seemed almost offended with me, not long ago, when I asked him to notice the resemblance between the two. None the less, the resemblance is real. The homeliest man may bear a family likeness to his handsome brother, though it may show itself only at times, and chance acquaintances may easily be unaware of its existence. The breeziest voice of the week was a pileated woodpecker’s--a flicker’s resonant _hi, hi_, in a fuller and clearer tone; and one of the most welcome voices was that of an olive-backed thrush. We were strolling past a roadside tangle of shrubbery when some unseen bird close by us began to warble confusedly (I was going to say autumnally, this kind of formless improvisation being so characteristic of the autumnal season), in a barely audible voice. My first thought was of a song sparrow; but that could hardly be, and I looked at my companion to see what he would suggest. He was in doubt also. Then, all at once, in the midst of the vocal jumble, our ears caught a familiar strain. “Yes, yes,” said I, “a Swainson thrush,” and I fell to whistling the tune softly for the benefit of the performer, whom I fancied, rightly or wrongly, to be a youngster at his practice. Young or old, the echo seemed not to put him out, and we stood still again to enjoy the lesson; disconnected, unrelated notes, and then, of a sudden, the regular Swainson measure. I had not heard it before since the May migration.