Oh! when the green grass softly waves above me In some low glen, Say, will the hearts that now so truly love me Think of me then; And, with fond tones that never more can move me, Call me again? Say, when the fond smiles in our happy home Their soft light shed, When round the hearth at quiet eve they come, And mine has fled, Will any gentle voice then ask for room-- _Room for the dead?_ Oh! will they say, as rosy day is dying, And shadows fall, "Come, let us speak of her now lowly lying, She loved us all!" And will a gentle tear-drop, then replying, From some eye fall? Give me, oh! give me not the echo ringing From trump of fame; Be mine, be mine the pearls from fond eyes springing, _This_, would I claim. Oh! may I think such memories _will_ be clinging Around my name. GRETTA. GAME-BIRDS OF AMERICA.--NO. IX. [Illustration: PASSENGER PIGEON.] This bird, the marvel of the whole Pigeon race, is beautiful in its colors, graceful in its form, and far more a child of wild nature than any other of the pigeons. The chief wonder, however, is in its multitudes; multitudes which no man can number; and when Alexander Wilson lays the mighty wand of the enchanter upon the Valley of the Mississippi, and conjures it up to the understanding and the feeling of the reader, with far more certain and more concentrated and striking effect than if it were painted on canvas, or modeled in wax, these pigeons form a feature in it which no one who knows can by possibility forget. It is probable that the multitudes may not be more numerous than those of the petrels in Bass's Strait, of which Captain Flinders--who also was a kind of Wilson in his way--gives a graphic description. But vast as the multitude of these was, it was only as a passing cloud to the captain; he was unable to follow it up; and even though he had, the flight of birds over the surface of the sea is tame and storyless, as compared with the movements of the unnumbered myriads of these pigeons in the great central valley of our continent. None of the names which have been bestowed upon this species are sufficiently, or at all, descriptive of it. Passenger, the English expression, and _Migratoria_, the Latin name, fall equally short, inasmuch as every known pigeon is to a greater or less extent migratory as well as this one. The "swarm" pigeon, the "flood" pigeon, or even the "deluge" pigeon would be a more appropriate appellation; for the weight of their numbers breaks down the forest with scarcely less havoc than if the stream of the Mississippi were poured upon it.