our arrival, and naturally we anticipated no difficulty in finding others; but for two or three hours we followed the chase in vain. Twice, to be sure, a sparrow of some sort flew up in front of us, but in both cases it got away without our obtaining so much as a peep at it. Up and down the beach we went, exploring the basins and sliding down the smooth, steep hills. Every step was interesting, but it began to look as if I must go home without seeing Ammodramus princeps. But patience was destined to have its reward, and just as we were traversing the upper part of the beach for the last time, I caught a glimpse of a bird skulking in the grass before us. He had seen us first, and was already on the move, ducking behind the scattered tufts of beach-grass, crouching and running by turns; but we got satisfactory observations, nevertheless, and he proved to be, like the other, an Ipswich sparrow. He did not rise, but finally made off through the grass without uttering a sound. Then we examined his footprints, and found them to be, so far as could be made out, the same as we had been noticing all about among the hills.
Meanwhile, our perambulations had not been in vain. Flocks of snow buntings were seen here and there, and we spent a long time in watching a trio of horned larks. These were feeding amid some stranded rubbish, and apparently felt not the slightest suspicion of the two men who stood fifteen or twenty feet off, eying their motions. It was too bad they could not hear our complimentary remarks about their costumes, so tastefully trimmed with black and yellow. Our loudest exclamations, however, were called forth by a dense flock of sea-gulls at the distant end of the beach. How many hundreds there were I should not dare to guess, but when they rose in a body their white wings really filled the air, and with the bright sunlight upon them they made, for a landsman, a spectacle to be remembered.
Altogether it was a high day for two enthusiasts, though no doubt it would have looked foolish enough to ordinary mortals, our spending several dollars of money and a whole day of time,—in November, at that,—all for the sake of ogling a few birds, not one of which we even attempted to shoot.
But what then? Tastes will differ; and as for enthusiasm, it is worth more than money and learning put together (so I believe, at least, without having experimented with the other two) as a producer of happiness. For my own part, I mean to be enthusiastic as long as possible, foreseeing only too well that high spirits cannot last forever.
The sand-hills themselves would have repaid all our trouble. Years ago this land just back of the beach was covered with forest, while at one end of it was a flourishing farm. Then when man, with his customary foolishness, cut off the forest, Nature revenged herself by burying his farm. We did not verify the fact, but according to the published accounts of the matter it used to be possible to walk over the grave of an old orchard, and pick here and there an apple from some topmost branch still jutting out through the sand.
Among the dunes we found abundance of a little red, heath-like plant, still in full blossom. Neither of us recognized it, but it turned out to be jointweed (Polygonum articulatum), and made a famous addition to my November flower catalogue.
In connection with all this I ought, perhaps, to say a word about our Ipswich driver, especially as naturalists are sometimes reprehended for taking so much interest in all other creatures, and so little in their fellow-men. As we drew near the beach, which is some five miles from the town, we began to find the roads quite under water, with the sea still rising. We remarked the fact, the more as we were to return on foot, whereupon the man said that the tide was uncommonly high on account of the heavy rain of the day before! A little afterward, when we came in sight of a flock of gulls, he gravely informed us that they were "some kind of ducks"! He had lived by the seashore all his life, I suppose, and of course felt entirely competent to instruct two innocent cockneys such as he had in his wagon.
Four days after this I made a trip to Nahant. If Ammodramus princeps was at Ipswich, why should it not be at other similar places? True enough, I found the birds feeding beside the road that runs along the beach. I chased them about for an hour or two in a cold high wind, and stared at them
till I was satisfied. They fed much of the time upon the golden-rods, alighted freely upon the fence-posts (which is what some writers would lead us never to expect), and often made use of the regular family tseep. Two of them kept persistently together, as if they were mated. One staggered me by showing a blotch in the middle of the breast, a mark that none of the published descriptions mention, but which I have since found exemplified in one of the skins at the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy, in Cambridge.
"A day is happily spent that shows me any bird I never saw alive before." So says Dr. Coues, and he would be a poor ornithologist who could not echo the sentiment. The Ipswich sparrow was the third such bird that I had seen during the year without going out of New England, the other two being the Tennessee warbler and the Philadelphia vireo.