share its emotions as you learn the significance of its notes. No one can listen to the song of the Mockingbird withiout being in some way affected ; but in how many hearts does the tink of the night-flying Bobolink find a response ? I never hear it without wishing the brave little traveler Godspeed on his long journey.
As time passes you will find that the songs of birds bring a constantly increasing pleasure. This is the result of association. The places and people that make our world are ever changing ; the present slips from us with growing rapidity, but the birds are ever with us.
The Robin singing so cheerily outside my window sings not for himself alone, but for hundreds of Robins I have known at other times and places. His song recalls a March evening, warm with the promise of spring ; May mornings, when all the world seemed to ring with the voices of birds ; June days, when cherries were ripening ; the winter sunlit forests of Florida, and even the snow-capped summit of glorious Popocatepetl. And so it is with other birds. We may, it is true, have known them for years, but they have not changed, and their familiar notes and appearance encourage the pleasant self-delusion that we too are the same.
The slender saplings of earlier years now give wide-spreading shade, the scrubby pasture lot has become a dense woodland. Boyhood's friends are boys no longer, and, worst of all, there has appeared another generation of boys whose presence is discouraging proof that for us youth has past. Then some May morning we hear the Wood Thrush sing. Has he, too, changed ? Not one note, and as his silvery voice rings through the woods we are young again. No fountain of youth could be more potent. A hundred incidents of the long ago become as real as those of yesterday. And here we have the secret of youth in age which every venerable natural-
