The crow blackbirds are in the advance-guard of the returning hosts of spring, making their appearance in small scattering flocks, and announcing their presence by loud smacks frequently repeated. They obtain most of their food from the ground, and walk about with great liveliness, scratching up the leaves, turning over chips and poking about the pastures for insects and seeds softened by the spring rains. Their destruction of insects--especially during May, when their young are in the nest--is enormous; yet their forays upon the cornfields, I fear, overbalance the good done the farmer by putting an end to grubs noxious to his crops. "The depredations committed by these birds are almost wholly on Indian corn at different stages. As soon as its blades appear above the ground after it has been planted, the grakles descend upon the fields, pull up the tender plant and devour the seeds, scattering the green blades around. It is of little use to attempt to drive them away with a gun: they only fly from one part of the field to another. And again, as soon as the tender corn has formed, these flocks, now replenished by the growing of the year, once more swarm in the cornfields, tear off the husks and devour the tender grains. Wilson has seen fields of corn in which more than half the corn was thus ruined. "These birds winter in immense numbers in the lower parts of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, sometimes forming one congregated multitude of several hundred thousand. On one occasion Wilson met, on the banks of the Roanoke, on the 20th of January, one of these prodigious armies of crow blackbirds. They arose, he states, from the surrounding fields with a noise like thunder, and descending on the length of the road before him, they covered it and the fences completely with black: when they again rose, and after a few evolutions descended on the skirts of the high-timbered woods, they produced a most singular and striking effect. Whole trees, for a considerable extent, from the top to the lowest branches, seemed as if hung with mourning. Their notes and screaming, he adds, seemed all the while like the distant sounds of a great cataract, but in a musical cadence." ERNEST INGERSOLL. OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP. THE MODERN FRENCH NOVELISTS.