The blue jay, I am confident, though I do not profess to be a jay scholar, makes a large use of interjections. This will constitute one of the difficulties with which his lexicographer will have to contend; for interjections, as all students of foreign tongues know, are among the hardest words to render from one language to another. A literal translation is liable to convey almost no meaning. When a Spaniard grows red in the face and vociferates, “_Jesús, María y José!”_ he is not thinking of the holy family, but in all likelihood of something very, very different; and when a devout New England deacon hears some surprising piece of news, and responds with “My conscience!” he is not thinking at all of the voice of God in the soul of man. Such phrases--and the jay language, I feel sure, is full of them--are not so much expressions of thought as vents for feeling. You may call them safety-valves. Emotion is like steam. If you stop the nose of the tea-kettle, off goes the cover. The hotter the blood, of course, the more need for such exclamatory outlets; and the jay, unless his behavior belies him, is Spaniard, Italian, and Frenchman all in one. I pity his lexicographer if he undertakes to render all his subject’s emotions in prim literary English. But I hope he will do the best he can, and I promise to buy his book. The linnet’s was the first spring song, I said; but it was first by an inch only; for even while I was setting down the paragraph a white-breasted nuthatch broke into a whistle close by my window. I turned at once to look at him. There he stood, in the top of the elm, perched crosswise upon a small twig, just as a sparrow might have been, and every half a minute throwing forward his head and emitting that peculiar whistle, broken into eight or ten syllables. Between times he looked to right and left, as if he had been calling for some one and was expecting a response. No response came, and after a little he disappeared. That was the second spring song, and a good one, though not to be compared with the linnet’s for musical quality. Now, say I, who bids for the third place? Perhaps it will be a bluebird, perhaps a robin, perhaps a song sparrow. CHIPMUNKS, BLUEBIRDS, AND ROBINS