They are late, most exceptionally so. I have never known anything to match it. Brave travelers as they are (some of them, yes, many of them, are on a three or four thousand mile journey; and a long flight it is for a five-inch bird, from South America to the arctic circle)--brave travelers as they are, they cannot contend against the inevitable, and our April weather, this year, was too much even for a bird’s punctuality. The yellow warbler, for example, one of the prettiest of the tribe, is by habit one of the truest to his schedule. In any ordinary season he may be confidently expected to arrive in our Boston country on the first day of May. If conditions favor his passage, he may even anticipate the date, perhaps by forty-eight hours. This year not a yellow warbler was to be seen up to May 6. Then, between the evening of the 6th and the morning of the 7th, the birds dropped into their accustomed places, and in the early forenoon, when I went out to look for them, they were singing as cheerily as if they had never been away. With nothing but their wits and their wings to depend upon, I thought they had done exceedingly well. To me, on such terms, South America would seem a very long way off. The same night brought the Nashville warblers. On the 6th not one was visible, for I made it my business to look. On the morning of the 7th I had no need to search for them. In all the old haunts, among the pitch-pines and the gray-birches, they were flitting about and singing, as fresh as larks and as lively as crickets. They, too, have come from the tropics, and will go as far north, some of them, as “Labrador and the fur countries.” A bold spirit may live under a few feathers. With them, I am pretty sure, came a goodly detachment of myrtle warblers (yellow-rumps), though the advance guards of that host (two birds were all that fell under my eye) were seen on the 18th of April. The great host is still to come; for the myrtles _are_ a host,--a multitude that no man can number. As I listen to their soft, dreamy trill on these fair spring mornings, when the tall valley willows are all in their earliest green,--a sight worth living for,--I seem sometimes to be for the moment on the heights of the White Mountains. Well I remember how much I enjoyed their quiet breath of song on the snowy upper slopes of Mt. Moosilauke in May a year ago. For the myrtle, notwithstanding his name, is a great lover of knee-high spruces. He is a lovely bird, wherever he lives, and it is good to see him flourish, though by so doing he forfeits the peculiar charm of novelty. Everything considered, I am bound to say, that is not so regrettable a loss. If he were as scarce as some of his relatives, every collector’s hand would be against him. Czars and rare birds must pay the price.