This crimson breast shield, by the way, is the family mark or coat of arms of the grosbeaks, just as the scarlet crest marks all the woodpeckers.  And if you ask a Micmac, deep in the woods, how the grosbeak got his shield, he may tell you a story that will interest you as did the legend of Hiawatha and the woodpecker in your childhood days.

If the old male, with his proud crimson, be rare with us, his beautiful song is still more so.  Only in the deep forests, by the lonely rivers of the far north, where no human ear ever hears, does he greet the sunrise from the top of some lofty spruce.  There also he pours into the ears of his sober little gray wife the sweetest love song of the birds.  It is a flood of soft warbling notes, tinkling like a brook deep under the ice, tumbling over each other in a quiet ecstasy of harmony; mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to whom he sang.  Those who know the music of the rose-breasted grosbeak (not his robin-like song of spring, but the exquisitely soft warble to his brooding mate) may multiply its sweetness indefinitely, and so form an idea of what the pine-grosbeak’s song is like.

But sometimes he forgets himself in his winter visit, and sings as other birds do, just because his world is bright; and then, once in a lifetime, a New England bird lover hears him, and remembers; and regrets for the rest of his life that the grosbeak’s northern country life has made him so shy a visitor.

* * * * *

One Christmas morning, a few years ago, the new-fallen snow lay white and pure over all the woods and fields.  It was soft and clinging as it fell on Christmas eve.  Now every old wall and fence was a carved bench of gleaming white; every post and stub had a soft white robe and a tall white hat; and every little bush and thicket was a perfect fairyland of white arches and glistening columns, and dark grottoes walled about with delicate frostwork of silver and jewels.  And then the glory, dazzling beyond all words, when the sun rose and shone upon it!

Before sunrise I was out.  Soon the jumping flight and cheery good-morning of a downy woodpecker led me to an old field with scattered evergreen clumps.  There is no better time for a quiet peep at the birds than the morning after a snow-storm, and no better place than the evergreens.  If you can find them at all (which is not certain, for they have mysterious ways of disappearing before a storm), you will find them unusually quiet, and willing to bear your scrutiny indifferently, instead of flying off into deeper coverts.