But I have perhaps lingered too long with birds and bird-songs. It is a fond subject, however, and scarcely can I forbear to speak of the veeries, the vesper-birds, and "hair-birds" whose nests we so often found in the orchard; the cedar birds or cherry birds which so persistently stripped the wild cherry trees and pear-plum shrubs; the wood thrushes that trilled forth such sad, mellow refrains in the cool, gray border of the wood-lot below the fields, at eventide; the yellow-hammers that tapped on the pasture stumps and cried out boisterously when rain was impending; the wrens that filled and re-filled a bit of hollow aqueduct log on the lane wall, with sticks for a nest and laid thirteen eggs in it; the hundreds of black-birds that built in the reeds down at the great bog, near the head of the lake; the sap-suckers that punctured the trunks of the apple-trees with thousands of tiny holes; the many-voiced blue-jays that came around when the corn was ripening in September and sometimes lingered all winter in the neighborhood. And of the great pileated woodpeckers, a pair of which occasionally cried loud and long from the five lofty pine stubs in the colt pasture, beyond the Aunt Hannah lot; the yellow-birds that piped, _pee-chid-aby_, _pee-chid-aby_, on wavy lines of flight, upon the last days of August, just ere taking wing for warmer climes; the imitative cat-birds that built in the alders along the road across the meadow, whose nests the boys held it lawful to destroy because, forsooth, "they sucked other birds' eggs," a false accusation rendered plausible, perhaps, from their disagreeable feline squalls, and not wholly ingenuous imitations of the songs of the thrush, the veery and the robin. How well, too, I recall the cuckoos that, night or day, intoned so moodily in the willow copses below the east field fence and suffered from a like unpopular accusation of "laying their eggs in other birds' nests." Also the mated triads of sooty chimney swallows that rumbled nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most surely lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp cries and concave stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree, tapping this one loudly, that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in the dead maple on the hillside was re-occupied year after year, till at last the stub blew down and broke short off at the hole itself; the king-fishers that with the same stooping flight, sprung their sharp rattles along the brooks and lakeside; the martins that feloniously caught the bees, and every season dragged their squalling, screaming young out of their pole-house, then poked them off the platform to fly for themselves, having first, however, cleared the yard of cats.