the time of the cherry blossoms; the brief glory of the apple orchards follows; and then the thronging dogwoods fill the forests with their radiance; and so flowers follow flowers until the springtime splendor closes with the laurel and the evanescent, honey-sweet locust bloom.  The late summer flowers follow, the flaunting lilies, and cardinal flowers, and marshmallows, and pale beach rosemary; and the goldenrod and the asters when the afternoons shorten and we again begin to think of fires in the wide fireplaces.

Most of the birds in our neighborhood are the ordinary home friends of the house and the barn, the wood lot and the pasture; but now and then the species make queer shifts.  The cheery quail, alas! are rarely found near us now; and we no longer hear the whip-poor-wills at night.  But some birds visit us now which formerly did not.  When I was a boy neither the black-throated green warbler nor the purple finch nested around us, nor were bobolinks found in our fields.  The black-throated green warbler is now one of our commonest summer warblers; there are plenty of purple finches; and, best of all, the bobolinks are far from infrequent.  I had written about these new visitors to John Burroughs, and once when he came out to see me I was able to show them to him.

When I was President, we owned a little house in western Virginia; a delightful house, to us at least, although only a shell of rough boards.  We used sometimes to go there in the fall, perhaps at Thanksgiving, and on these occasions we would have quail and rabbits of our own shooting, and once in a while a wild turkey.  We also went there in the spring.  Of course many of the birds were different from our Long Island friends.  There were mocking-birds, the most attractive of all birds, and blue grosbeaks, and cardinals and summer redbirds, instead of scarlet tanagers, and those wonderful singers the Bewick’s wrens, and Carolina wrens.  All these I was able to show John Burroughs when he came to visit us; although, by the way, he did not appreciate as much as we did one set of inmates of the cottage—­the flying squirrels.  We loved having the flying squirrels, father and mother and half-grown young, in their nest among the rafters; and at night we slept so soundly that we did not in the least mind the wild gambols of the little fellows through the rooms, even when, as sometimes happened, they would swoop down to the bed and scuttle across it.

One April I went to Yellowstone Park, when the snow was still very deep, and I took John Burroughs with me.  I wished to show him the big game of the Park, the wild creatures that have become so astonishingly tame and tolerant of human presence.  In the Yellowstone the animals seem always to behave as one wishes them to!  It is always possible to see the sheep and deer and antelope, and also the great herds of elk, which are shyer than the smaller beasts.  In April we found the elk weak after the short commons and