“Blackbirds,” said Mike, looking aloft, but I knew better. I watched them wistfully, with eager hope, and when they were over me and I saw their orange bills, I knew that I had not been mistaken. They were starlings, beloved friends of my boyhood, come across the seas at last after all these years, looking for me, perhaps. It seemed as if it must be so, and I dropped spade and trowel, and took up hammer and saw to make boxes for them as I used to, so that they might know I was waiting to welcome them. I am waiting now. Every day I look to see if my feathered chum is there, perched at my window. And he will come, I know. For he cannot have forgotten the good times we had in the long ago. You see, we grew up together. Almost the earliest thing I remember is the box at my bedroom window which the first rays of the rising sun struck in spring. Then, as soon as ever the winter snows were gone and the daffodils peeped through the half-frozen crust, some morning there would be a mighty commotion in that box. Black shadows darted in and out, and a great scratching and thumping went on. And while I lay and watched with heart beating fast,--for was not here my songster playmate back with the summer and the sunlight on his burnished wing?--out he came on the peg for a sidelong peep at my window, and sat and whistled the old tune, nodding to the bare trees he knew with his brave promise that presently Jack Frost would be banished for good, and all would be right. Was he not there to prove it? And it was even so. The summer was right on his trail always. The weeks passed, and the Old Town lay buried in a dreamy sea of blossoming elders. In field and meadow the starling was busy from early dawn till the sun was far in the west; for his young, of whom there was always a vigorous family,--and oh! the glorious blue eggs we loved to peep at before Mrs. Starling had taken them under her wing,--had a healthy appetite and required no end of grubs and worms. But whether they went to sleep early or he thought they had had enough, always when the setting sun gilded the top of the old poplar, he would come with all his friends and sing his evening song. In the very top branches, swaying with the summer wind, they would sit and whistle the clear notes in the minor key I hear yet when I am worn and tired, and that tell me that some day it will all come back, the joy and the sunshine of the young days. It was for him I turned my boyish hands to their first labor of love. I made him a house of an empty starch box, and later on, when I had learned carpentering, I built for his family a tenement of three flats that hung by my window many years after I knew it no more. I had long been absorbed in the fight with tenements made for human kind by builders with no such friendly feelings, when my father wrote that the winter storms had blown down the box and broken it, and that written inside in my boyish hand, they found these words: