A CONGRESS OF BIRDS.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Dear Jack-in-the-Pulpit: I have something to tell you about some of your friends the birds, and perhaps your chicks can help answer the questions the anecdote raises.
One summer evening of 1846, at Catskill Village, vast numbers of whip-poor-wills and swallows began to gather from all directions about an hour before sunset, and in a few minutes the sky was dark with their wings. They assembled above a high hill, and over the cemetery which was on this hill they circled and wheeled and mixed together, calling and twittering in a state of great excitement. They were so many that, standing anywhere in the cemetery, which covered about forty acres, one might have knocked them down by hundreds with an ordinary fishing-rod.
The birds, though of such opposite natures, mingled in a friendly way, and seemed to be trying to settle some question of importance to both parties. Soon, the sun sank behind the mountains, and, while his last rays were fading, the birds went off in squads, as they had come, and all quickly disappeared.
Whence they came, whither they went, and why they assembled, are yet mysteries to, your friend,
Z.R.B.
MIDSUMMER NOON.
Here are some lines I heard a summer or two ago. It seems to me that John Clare—-the man who wrote them, I believe—must have made them when he was near my pulpit, for they tell just how things are here these sultry noons.
"The busy noise of man and brute
Is on a sudden hushed and mute;
Even the brook that leaps along
Seems weary of its merry song,
And, so soft its waters sleep,