There is every year the one memorable morning when we can say, in broad terms, “The birds are here.” When the oriole whistles from the tallest tree in the lawn; when the wren chatters from the portal of his old-time home; when the indigo-finch sings in the weedy pasture; when lisping warblers throng every tree and shrub; while over all, high in air, the twittering swallows dart in ecstasy; and at last, the day-long concert over, whippoorwills in the woods pipe their monotonous refrain. The Indians were right: when there came such days as this, they had no further fear of frost, and we need have but little. Our climate certainly has changed slightly since their time, but we have in such a bird-full day an assurance that the clinging finger-tips of Winter have at last relaxed and his hold upon our fields and forests is lost. A word again of the advance guard. The brown thrush came on the seventeenth of the month (April, 1892), when there were no leafy thickets and the maples only were in bloom. What a glorious herald he proved! and so he always proves. Before the sun was up I heard him in my dreams, and later the fancy proved a fact. Perched at the very top of an old walnut-tree, where the wintry world was spread before him, he sang that song peculiarly his own. No hint of blushing roses on the hill, The buds are sleeping yet upon the plain, The blight of dreary winter clingeth still, The forest weeps where falls the chilly rain. Scarce hopeful leaf-buds shrink—death’s solemn hush Rests on the field, the meadow brook along, Till breaks the day, O happy day! the thrush Foretells the coming summer in a song. Two days later it was almost summer, and tripping along the river’s pebbly beach were spotted sand-pipers. They were ahead of time this year, I thought, but none the less happy because the trees were bare and the water cold; but, stranger still, in the sheltered coves of the mill-pond, that now reflected the gold of the spice-wood and the crimson of the overhanging maples, there were warblers, merry as in midsummer, and a pair, at least, of small thrushes. A bittern, too, stood in the weedy marsh. There they had gathered on that sunny, summery day, as if warm weather was an established fact; but how different the next morning, when a cold north-east storm prevailed! How well it showed that one such sunny day does not make a season! How clearly it proved that birds have no prophetic insight! They were caught and suffered and disappeared. Did they fly above the clouds and go to some distant point, free of chilling rain, or did they hide in the cedar swamps? This problem I did not essay to solve. In the few cedars along the river-shore I found nothing but winter residents, but I made no careful search. A few days later and spring-like conditions again prevailed and every day some new bird was seen, but not until May 1 could we say, “The birds have come.”