The earliest comers are the blue jays. They anticipate the first call for breakfast, appearing before sunrise. Jays are a shrewd set. They can put two and two together with the sharpest of us. Man, they have discovered, is a laggard in the morning. Then is their time. In very bad weather, indeed, they come at all hours; but they are always wary. If I raise the window an inch or two and set it down with a slam, away they go; though, likely as not, I look out again five minutes later to find them still there. In times of dearth one may reasonably risk something for a good piece of suet. The jays take what they can, somewhat against our will. The table is spread for smaller people: for downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, and chickadees, with whom appears now and then, always welcome, a brown creeper. The table is set for them, I say; and they seem to know it. They come not as thieves, but as invited guests, or, better still, as members of the family. No opening and shutting of windows puts them to flight. Why should it? There are at least a dozen baiting-places about the house, and they know every one of them. Though the fare is everywhere the same, they seem to find a spice of variety in taking a bite at one table after another. My own principal enjoyment of the business, at present, is connected with a new toy, if I may call it so: a small, loosely knit, or crocheted, bag--made of knitting-cotton, I think I was told--sent to me by a correspondent in Vermont. Into this, following the donor’s instructions, I have put nutmeats and hung it out of a window of my working-room, throwing a cord over the top of the upper sash, and allowing the bag to dangle against the pane. At first I broke the nuts into small pieces, but I soon learned better than that. Now I divide the filbert once, and for the most part the birds (chickadees only, thus far) have to stay on the bag and eat, instead of pulling out the pieces whole and making off with them. The sight is a pretty one--as good as a play. I am careful not to fill the bag, and the feeder is compelled to hang bottom side up under it, and strike upward. The position is graceful and not in the least inconvenient, and possesses, moreover, a great economical advantage: the crumbs, some of which are of necessity spilled, drop on the eater’s breast, instead of to the ground. I see him stop continually to pick them off. “Gather up the fragments,” he says, “that nothing be lost.”