One day a pair of juncos appeared on the scene, mingling fraternally with the sparrows, and sharing their usual pickings around back doors and along the back fence, and white-throated sparrows showed themselves on the shrubs and small trees which overhung the division walls.
But the crowning day of the empty lot came still later, when a fairy-like kinglet hunted over the rosebushes, and that shy woods dweller, the hermit thrush, condescended to show his graceful form on the fence, until the silver tabby, seeming to regard their calls as intrusions, took up his station on the cats' highway and I saw the birds no more.
IN THE BIRD-ROOM.
XII.
THE SOLITAIRE.
Give sunlight for the lark and robin,
Sun and sky, and mead and bloom;
But give for this rare throat to throb in,
And this lonesome soul to sob in,
Wildwoods with their green and gloom.
Coates Kinney.