But a conversation which was going on at the lower end of the table interested Elvira most of all. It was about birds, including some of her favorites of the woods and fields which she had noticed a great deal in her solitary rides that summer. The principal speaker was a young farmer whom she had never seen before. He seemed to be acquainted with the names and habits of all the birds which lived in that section, besides many which merely passed through it on their way northward every spring and southward every fall. "I have kept a record of the time of each arrival," he said, "and notes of rare birds. The bluebird came first, and the humming-bird last. And I discovered two birds that were new to me. One is a Northern bunting. A flock stayed one day in our orchard on their way northward to their summer home, and I succeeded in killing and stuffing a pair. The feathers of the male were a beautiful pink-red. The other strange bird seemed to come with the scarlet tanager, and is much like a pee-wee in shape and size, with feathers of a greenish yellow." "When do you find time to learn so much about birds?" asked George Loper, who knew only a few of the more common ones,--blackbirds, crows, jays, hawks, and robins,--and had no eyes for the variety of feathered life around him. "I keep my eyes open as I work and as I go along the road," answered young Farmer Worth; "then I look up their names and read something about them in a book on birds which I have. You've no idea how much enjoyment there is in it. I have quite a collection of birds which I have stuffed, and more than a hundred different kinds of eggs, besides my cabinet of mineral specimens. I nailed two ladders together, and climbed thirty feet above these and got a crow's nest; and this spring we found a hawk's nest in a high tree. We tied a stout twine to a small stone, which we threw over the forks of the tree, and with this drew a large rope over. Then I sat in the noose of the rope, and three boys pulled me up sixty feet to the nest. It was rather scary, I can tell you, and I was glad to get down to the ground again; but I got the hawk's nest." Then Elvira asked him if he could tell her the name of the bird with a yellow head, but otherwise black plumage, which she had noticed not long before in a flock of common blackbirds; and they were soon in an animated conversation on the subject of birds in general. Elvira had noticed many that summer which she could describe, but whose names she did not know.