We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at one time. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it is now!" And sure enough, there it was in full song--a little bird the shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain. As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me. Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went among them and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the blue grosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify. In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen what he had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described how they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where they alighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wild pigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon his mind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, he would have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as it was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. We talked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seen them. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wild pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Roosevelt wrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistaken about their being pigeons. One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to save itself from his hand. One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not appear. During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been one ahead of me. I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor, I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes. "Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I do."