In 1907, after a very hot week in early March, we had an exceedingly late and cold spring. The first bird I heard sing in the White House grounds was a white-throated sparrow on March 1st, a song sparrow speedily following. The white-throats stayed with us until the middle of May, overlapping the arrival of the indigo buntings; but during the last week in April and first week in May their singing was drowned by the music of the purple finches, which I never before saw in such numbers around the White House. When we sat by the south fountain, under an apple tree then blossoming, sometimes three or four purple finches would be singing in the fragrant bloom overhead. In June a pair of wood thrushes and a pair of black-and-white creepers made their homes in the White House grounds, in addition to our ordinary homemakers, the flickers, redheads, robins, catbirds, song sparrows, chippies, summer yellow-birds, grackles, and, I am sorry to say, crows. A handsome sapsucker spent a week with us. In the same year five night herons spent January and February in a swampy tract by the Potomac, half a mile or so from the White House. At Mount Vernon there are of course more birds than there are around the White House, for it is in the country. At present but one mocking-bird sings around the house itself, and in the gardens and the woods of the immediate neighborhood. Phœbe birds nest at the heads of the columns under the front portico; and a pair—or rather, doubtless, a succession of pairs—has nested in Washington’s tomb itself, for the twenty years since I have known it. The cardinals, beautiful in plumage, and with clear ringing voices, are characteristic of the place. I am glad to say that the woods still hold many gray—not red—foxes; the descendants of those which Washington so perseveringly hunted.