The bird-baby world was not bounded by any pasture, however enchanting, and I have not told all the charms of this one. The house where I found bed and board, in the intervals of bird study,--once a farmhouse, now an "inn of rest" for a country-loving-family,--was happily possessed of two attractions: the pasture toward which I turned with the morning sun, and a meadow which drew me when shadows grew long in the afternoon. This meadow began at the road passing in front of the house, and extended to the salt marsh which separated us from the sea. The marsh was always a beautiful picture, "Stretching off in a pleasant plain To the terminal blue of the main." It was never twice the same, for it changed with every passing cloud, with every phase of the weather, with every tide; one never tired of it. And it was full of winged life: not only the beautiful gulls, "Whose twinkling wings half lost amid the blue," in a white cloud over the far-off beach, but small birds of several kinds, who never came near enough to dry land to be identified. Sharp-tailed sparrows appeared on the meadow after grass was cut, and their exquisite ringing trill could always be heard from the bank; crows fed upon it every day; blackbirds' wings were always over it; and above all, sandpipers were there, "Calling dear and sweet from cove to cove." One afternoon, starting down the meadow on my usual visit to the sandpiper little folk, I heard a low cry of "flick-er! flick-er!" and there on the grass before me were two of the birds face to face. One was an adult, but the other was a nearly grown young one, and I saw in an instant that I had unwittingly intruded upon the breakfast he was about to receive. In the goldenwing family--as perhaps not every one knows--a repast is not over with one poke into an open bill; it is a far more serious affair indeed. The young bird opens his mouth a little, the parent thrusts his--or her--beak down the waiting throat, until one would think the infant must be choked, and then the elder delivers little pokes, as he crams down the mouthfuls, six, eight, even ten I have counted before he stops. Then the heads draw apart, and the grown-up--who has plainly come well provided--makes a sort of spasmodic movement in his own throat, probably raising from some internal reservoir another portion of food, the infant opens his beak again, and the operation is repeated. [Illustration: TAKING BREAKFAST--THE GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER] [Sidenote: _TAKING HIMSELF TOO SERIOUSLY._] Of course my presence interfered with this elaborate, several-course breakfast, and the elder of the two fell to reproaching me by loud calls and vehement bows in my direction. Seeing that I was not sufficiently impressed, and did not depart, he resorted to stronger measures; he swayed his head from side to side, stretching out his neck like an enraged goose, and presenting a most droll appearance.