A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a
jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the
same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five
each are raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to
the homestead? By what right of primogeniture? Once, the children of a
man employed about the place ooelogized the nest, and the pewees left us
for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the
Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the
pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so
near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly
on the wing.... The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning;
and, during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of
_pewee_ with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He saddens
with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to _eheu,
pewee_! I as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would
have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often
to pursue a fly through the open window into my library.
There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of
a lifetime.
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