a tomtit nesting in the shutter hinge and the light from your shaving mirror will make the poor little birds crosseyed when they’re hatched.”  I try to shave in the dining-room and I find a sparrow’s nest on the window sill.  Finally I do my toilet in the coal bin, even though there is a young squeaking bat down there.  A bat is half mouse anyway, so Titania has less compassion for its feelings.  Even if that bat grows up bow-legged on account of premature excitement, I have to shave somewhere.

We can’t play croquet at this time of year, because the lawn must be kept clear for the robins to quarry out worms.  The sound of mallet and ball frightens the worms and sends them underground, and then it’s harder for the robins to find them.  I suppose we really ought to keep a stringed orchestra playing in the garden to entice the worms to the surface.  We have given up frying onions because the mother robins don’t like the odor while they’re raising a family.  I love my toast crusts, but Titania takes them away from me for the blackbirds.  “Now,” she says, “they’re raising a family.  You must be generous.”

If my garden doesn’t amount to anything this year the birds will be my alibi.  Titania makes me do my gardening in rubber-soled shoes so as not to disturb the birds when they are going to bed. (They begin yelping at 4 a.m. right outside the window and never think of my slumbers.) The other evening I put on my planting trousers and was about to sow a specially fine pea I had brought home from town when Titania made signs from the window.  “You simply mustn’t wear those trousers around the house in nesting season.  Don’t you know the birds are very sensitive just now?” And we have been paying board for our cat on Long Island for a whole year because the birds wouldn’t like his society and plebeian ways.

Marathon has come to a pretty pass, indeed, when the commuters are to be dispossessed in this way by a lot of birds, orioles and tomtits and yellow-bellied nuthatches.  Some of these days a wren will take it into its head to build a nest on the railroad track and we’ll all have to walk to town.  Or a chicken hawk will settle in our icebox and we’ll starve to death.

As I have said before, I believe in keeping nature in its proper place.  Birds belong in trees.  I don’t go twittering and fluffing about in oaks and chestnuts, perching on the birds’ nest steps and getting in their way.  And why should some swarthy robin, be she never so matronly, swear at me if I set foot on my own front porch?

A MESSAGE FOR BOONVILLE

When corncob pipes went up from a nickel to six cents, smoking traditions tottered.  That was a year or more ago, but one can still recall the indignation written on the faces of nicotine-soaked gaffers who had been buying cobs at a jitney ever since Washington used one to keep warm at Valley Forge.  It was the supreme test of our determination to win the war:  the price of Missouri meerschaums went up 20 per cent and there was no insurrection.