Didst ever, dear reader, sit in one position on a camp-stool without a back, with head thrown back, and eyes fixed upon one small bird thirty feet from the ground, afraid to move or turn your eyes, lest you miss what you are waiting for, while the sun moves steadily on till his hottest rays pour through some opening directly upon you; while mosquitoes sing about your ears (would that they sang only!), and flies buzz noisily before your face; while birds flit past, and strange notes sound from behind; while rustling in the dead leaves at your feet suggests snakes, and a crawling on your neck proclaims spiders? If you have not, you can never appreciate the enthusiasms of a bird student, nor realize what neck-breaks and other discomforts one will cheerfully endure to witness the first flight of a nestling. This affair turned out, however, as in many another case of great expectations, to be no remarkable performance. When the débutant had made his toilet, he flew, as if he had done it all his life, to the next tree, where he began at once to call for refreshment, after his exertion. Disappointed, we dropped our eyes, whisked away our insect tormentors, gathered up our properties, and passed on our way. This was the farthest point of our wanderings. The way back was through a narrow path beside the oven-bird's pretty domed nest, then between the tangle of wild-berry bushes and saplings, where a cuckoo had set up housekeeping, and where veeries and warblers had successfully hidden their nests, tantalizing us with calls and songs from morning till night; from thence through the garden, past the kitchen door, home. XIV. A BOBOLINK RHAPSODY. Can anything be more lovely than a meadow in June, its tall grass overtopped by daisies, whose open faces, "Candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Publish themselves to the sky"? One such I knew, despised of men as a meadow, no doubt, but glorious to the eye with its unbroken stretch of white bowing before the summer breeze like the waves of the sea, and charming as well to pewee and kingbird who hovered over it, ever and anon diving and bringing up food for the nestlings. When, to a meadow not so completely abandoned to daisies, where buttercups and red clover flourish among the grass, is added the music of the meadow's poet, the bobolink, surely nothing is lacking to its perfection.