I was sorry to have missed his story of the battle, and ashamed to have seemed ungrateful and rude, but I forget what apology I offered. At this distance it is hard to see how I could have got out of the affair with much dignity. I might have heard all about the battle from a man who was there, and instead I went off to listen to a sparrow singing in a bush. I thought, to be sure, that the men would be longer upon the observatory, and that I should still be in season. Probably that was my excuse, if I made one; and in all likelihood the veteran was too completely taken up with his own concerns to think twice about the vagaries of a stray Yankee, who seemed to be an odd stick, to say nothing worse of him. Well, the loss, such as it was, was mine, not his; and I have lost too much time in the way of business to fret over a little lost (or saved) in the way of pleasure. As for any apparent lack of patriotic feeling, I suppose that the noblest patriot in the world, if he chanced to be also an ornithologist, would notice a bird even amid the smoke of battle; and why should not I do as much on a field from which the battle smoke had vanished thirty years before? So I reason now; at the time I had no leisure for such sophistries. Every moment brought some fresh distraction. The long hill--woodland, brambly pasture, and shrubby dooryard--was a nest of singing birds; and when at last I climbed the tower, I came down again almost as suddenly as my Louisiana friends had done. The landscape,--the city and its suburbs, the river, the mountains,--all this would be here to-morrow; just now there were other things to look at. Here in the grass, almost under my nose, were a pair of Bewick wrens, hopping and walking by turns, as song sparrows may sometimes be found doing; conscious through and through of my presence, yet affecting to ignore it; carrying themselves with an indescribable and pretty demureness, as if a nest were something never dreamed of by birds of their kind; the female, nevertheless, having at that moment her beak bristling with straws, while the male, a proud young husband, hovered officiously about her with a continual sweetly possessive manner and an occasional burst of song. Till yesterday Bewick's wren had been nothing but a name to me. Then, somewhere after crossing the state line, the train stopped at a station, and suddenly through the open window came a song. "That's a Bewick wren," I said to myself, as I stepped across the aisle to look out; and there he stood, on the fence beside the track, his long tail striking the eye on the instant. He sang again, and once again, before the train started. Tennessee was beginning well with a visiting bird-gazer.