Roof and Meadow | Page 3

he never caught an ant, never one of the fifth-story mosquitos
that live and bite till Christmas, how greatly still my sky would need
him! His flight is song enough. His cry and eery thunder are the very
voice of the summer twilight to me. And as I watch him coasting in the
evening dusk, that twilight often falls--over the roofs, as it used to fall
for me over the fields and the quiet hollow woods.
There is always an English sparrow on my roof--which does not
particularly commend the roof to bird-lovers, I know. I often wish the
sparrow an entirely different bird, but I never wish him entirely away
from the roof. When there is no other defense for him, I fall back upon
his being a bird. Any kind of a bird in the city! Any but a parrot.
A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves-trough, so close to the
roof that I can overhear their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar
Cock Sparrow is a family man--so entirely a family man as to be
nothing else at all. He is a success, too. It does me good to see him
build. He tore the old nest all away in the early winter, so as to be ready.
There came a warm springish day in February, and he began. A
blizzard stopped him, but with the melting of the snow he went to work
again, completing the nest by the middle of March.
He built for a big family, and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but _them_; for
there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the
course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the
children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof
above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his
wife came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately
around at the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself,
and then crawl dutifully in upon the eggs.
I knew how he felt. It is not in a cock sparrow to enjoy hatching eggs. I
respected him; for though he grumbled, as any normal husband might,
still he was "drinking fair" with Mrs. Sparrow. He built and brooded

and foraged for his family, if not as sweetly, yet as faithfully, as his
wife. He deserved his blessed abundance of children.
Is he songless, sooty, uninteresting, vulgar? Not if you live on a roof.
He may be all of this, a pest even, in the country. But upon my roof, for
weeks at a stretch, his is the only bird voice I hear. Throughout the
spring, and far into the summer, I watch the domestic affairs in the
eaves-trough. During the winter, at nightfall, I see little bands and
flurries of birds scudding over and dropping behind the high buildings
to the east. They are sparrows on the way to their roost in the elms of
an old mid-city burial-ground.
I not infrequently spy a hawk soaring calmly far away above the roof.
Not only the small ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger,
wilder species come, and winding up close to the clouds, circle and
circle there, trying apparently to see some meaning in the maze of
moving, intersecting lines of dots below yonder in the cracks of that
smoking, rumbling blur.
In the spring, from the trees of the Common, which are close, but,
except for the crown of one noble English elm, are shut away from me,
I hear an occasional robin and Baltimore oriole. Very rarely a
woodpecker will go over. The great northern shrike is a frequent winter
visitor, but by ill chance I have not been up when he has called at the
roof.
One of these fiend birds haunts a small court only a block away, which
is inclosed in a high board fence, topped with nails. He likes the court
because of these nails. They are sharp; they will stick clean through the
body of a sparrow. Sometimes the fiend has a dozen sparrows run
through with them, leaving the impaled bodies to flutter in the wind
and finally fall away.
In sight from my roof are three tiny patches of the harbor; sometimes a
fourth, when the big red-funneled liner is gone from her slip. Down to
the water of the harbor in flocks from the north come other winter
visitors, the herring and black-backed gulls. Often during the winter I
find them in my sky.

One day they will cross silently over the city in a long straggling line.
Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voices
shrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead,