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DELIGHTFUL READING for all seasons; bright, varied,entertaining, instruct ive; Serial and Short Stories, Sketches, Essays, Poems, etc.

Volumes of SUNDAY AFTERNOON for 1878.

Handsomely Bound in Cloth, Beveled Edges, with a tasteful Cover Design in Black and Gold, specially prepared for this purpose.

THEIR CONTENTS comprise a wide variety of attractive matter, all original, pre-eminently readable, and of permanent value and interest. There are Essays, Sketches, Poems, and a large proportion of Fiction of the first class, both Serial and Short Stories. 576 Pages in each volume. THE WRITERS include many of the best Magazine Contributors of the day.

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Two Serials are included in this volume; one by John Habberton; the other (all but the last chapter) TOM's HEATHEN, of which Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote:

"Its great merit is its originality of conception, and the freshness and individuality of thought shown in every detail. I am somewhat blase with the multitude of stories, and do not often read one through, but reading this in manuscript my attention was enchained from first to last."

VOLUME TWO (July–Dec.)

Has contributions among others from

EDWARD EVERETT HALE,
PROF. W. E. GRIFFIS,

LYMAN ABBOTT,

REV. J. B. HARRISON,

REBBECCA HARDING DAVIS,

LUCY LARCOM,

JULIA C. R. DORR,

LIZZIE W. CHAMPNEY,

ZADEL BARNES GUSTAFSON,
REV. CHARLES A. RICHARDS,
REV. GEORGE T. LADD.
HORACE E. SCUDDER,
PAUL H. HAYNE,
PROF. J. A. PAINE,
REV. DR. J. T. TUCKER,
CHAS, H. WOODMAN,

ROSE TERRY COOKE,
MARY A. P. STANSBURY,
ELLEN W. OLNEY,
HELEN CAMPBELL,
ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN,
SUSAN COOLIDGE,
MARGARET J. PRESTON,
RT. REV. T. N. CLARKE.

This volume has the whole of CHIPS FROM A NORTHWESTERN LOG, a record of personal experience in the wilds of the Northwest, and an account of what has been done for the civilization of the Indians; all but one chapter of FISHERS OF MEN, a capital serial; and all but two installments of E. E. Hale's serial, "AUNT HULDAH'S SCHOLARS," since published in book form under the title of MRS. MERRIAM'S SCHOLARS. (This story begins in the No. for June, and ends in the No, for January, 1879.) Price of the Volumes $1.75 each. To be had of booksellers, or will be sent, charges prepaid, on receipt of price. Address SUNDAY AFTERNOON, SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

WHAT IS SAID OF THESE VOLUMES.
From the Hartford Courant.

"Two very handsome volumes remind us that The Sunday Afternoon, a monthly magazine for the household, has completed a successful year. Indeed the magazine has been a success in its reception, from the first number. * The secret of the success of Sunday Afternoon is twofold; it published short stories that have a good moral tone and are not mawkish; and it treated social topics of immediate interest in a fresh and vigorous manner. It enlisted at once many of the best writers, and they treated the living topics of social and religious life with freedom and candor; and the editorial department has always been frank and free from prejudice, and on topics about which people were talking."

From the Boston Advertiser.

"A special field, unoccupied and richly worthy of cultivation, lay before it, and in this first year's work it has manifested a thorough fitness to enter that field. From the beginning it has taken place with the other monthlies on the ground of its literary excellence alone, and the moral purpose which animates its essays, stories and poems gives it a distinctive and healthful atmosphere. Sunday Afternoon, having a constant purpose before it, dealing with the serious things of life in a courageous and cheerful tone, has that effectivness which comes of direct effort for an end. The first two volumes contain much which is as readable at any time as for the date of its issue, for the thoughts of our ripest scholars and thinkers have more than

fleeting value. An attractive cover adds to the volumes a beauty which makes them fitting library or table ornaments.'

From the Christian Union. "In point of external attractiveness the bound volumes of Sunday Afternoon, in their tasteful dress, rank fairly alongside of any of the gift books of the season. The cover design, by Mr. E. J.N. Stent of New York, is at once graceful and appropriate. As regards their internal excellence, too much can hardly be said in praise. Those who have followed the magazine from month to month do not need to be told how many clever sketches, and helpful essays the volumes contain. In turntender verses, delightful stories, and thoughtful Ing their pages one is not at all surprised that the magazine has kept the place in the front rank of our periodical literature which it took with its very first number. Its success has been largely due to its admirable selection of articles, and that in turn to its nice editorial discrimination."

From the Christian Advocate, New York. "Bound volumes for the year 1878 are before us. and a careful examination of the subjects handled and the men handling them leaves no shade of doubt concerning the ability and desirability of their publication. We have met no abler and no better puttings and defense of the great truths of life. The articles are short, rich, strong, popu lar, clear, evangelical. This magazine stands in the foremost rank."

Contributors should enclose stamps when manuscript is sent, if they wish to have it returned if rejected. Remittances should be made by Draft or Money Order payable to Edward F. Merriam.

Terms, $3.00 a Year, postage paid. Good Canvassers wanted. Address all communications, Sunday Afternoon, Springfield, Mass.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON:

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE FOR THE HOUSEHOLD.

VOL. III. JUNE, 1879.-No. XVIII.

AT HOME FROM CHURCH.

The lilacs lift in generous bloom

Their plumes of dear old-fashioned flowers;
Their fragrance fills the still old house

Where left alone I count the hours.

High in the apple-trees the bees

Are humming, busy in the sun,—

An idle robin cries for rain

But once or twice and then is done.

The Sunday-morning quiet holds
In heavy slumber all the street,

While from the church, just out of sight
Behind the elms, comes slow and sweet

The organ's drone, the voices faint

That sing the quaint long-meter hymn

I somehow feel as if shut out

From some mysterious temple, dim

And beautiful with blue and red

And golden lights from windows high,

Where angels in the shadows stand
And earth seems very near the sky.

The day-dream fades-and so I try
Again to catch the tune that brings
No thought of temple nor of priest,
But only of a voice that sings.

Sarah O. Jewett.

HOW CIVILIZATION FAVORS OUR BIRDS.

To say that the settlement of North Amer- and upon the birds as a part of the fauna, ica by white men has produced a marked may seem too much of a truism to be worth effect upon the animal life of the continent, discussion. Yet the degree to which this

Copyright, 1879, by E. F. Merriam.

effect has been felt, and the various ways in which man's influence has been exerted upon animals, might still be objects of interesting inquiry. I confine myself alone to the effects produced by the white man, because the Indian seems to have caused hardly an appreciable change either for good or for evil in the comparative plenitude or in the habits of the creatures dwell ing about him. He himself was really as wild and indigenous as they, hunting, like the carnivores, purely for food, and, like the osprey, fishing only when his wants were urgent. His mind was too grim to entertain the idea of pursuing animals for sport; and his civilization too limited to cause much disturbance of natural conditions.

During the last two and a half centuries white men have spread everywhere, and their machinery has replaced the original simplicity of nature over almost the whole continent. Thousands of square miles of forest have been cleared off, marshes have been drained, rivers obstructed and tormented with mill-wheels, and cities have sprung up as swiftly as the second-growth of scrubpines follows the leveling of an oak wood.

The inevitable result would seem to have been that all animals, birds included, would have been so harassed by their changed surroundings and the persecutions of human foes that they would have rapidly disappeared. With the vast majority of the quadrupeds this has been actually the case. "Wild beasts no longer haunt our forests to the terror of the traveler, nor can the hunter now find the game which only a few decades ago was abundant almost in his door-yard. It has resulted very much the same with the wild-fowl and the game birds, which have deserted their ancient nestingplaces within our borders for the safer Arctic heaths, or, old and young, have been all but exterminated by the gun and snare.

small birds are seen in the depths of a forest, but that they become abundant as one approaches the neighborhood of settlements. Travelers through Siberia know that they are coming near a village when they begin to hear the voices of birds, which are totally absent from the intervening solitudes. Every ornithologist has proved these facts in his own experience, and explorers who go to uninhabited and primeval regions have learned not to expect there the chorus that greets their ears from the great army of songsters in populous countries.

The song birds, the small denizens of our summer groves, pastures and meadows, seem, then, to recognize the presence of man's civilization as a blessing, and have taken advantage of it both from love of human society and for more solid and prosaic reasons. The settlement of a country implies the felling of forests, the letting in upon the ground of light and warmth, the propagation of seed-bearing cereals, weeds and grasses enormously in excess of a natural state of things, the destruction of noxious quadrupeds and reptiles, and the introduction of horses and cattle. Each of these alterations of nature (except in some cases the woodpeckers for instance the firstmentioned) is a direct benefit to the little birds. It is not difficult to demonstrate this.

Birds naturally choose sunny spots in which to build their nests, such as some little glade or the bank of a stream: when roads were cut through the sombre woods, and fields leveled in them, the places suitable for nesting were of course greatly added to, and a better chance thus afforded for successfully hatching and rearing their broods of young. One of the largest families of our birds, that of the sparrows, finches and buntings, subsists almost exclusively on seeds of weeds and grasses; and the members of a large proportion of other families depend somewhat for their daily supply on this sort of food. Under the universal shade of the trees weeds can grow only sparingly, and on the prairies the crop is often killed by drought or burned in the autumn; but the cultivation of immense

Nevertheless there is a large series of the smaller birds of our wood-lands and prairies, which, as I hope to show, have been decidedly benefited by the advent of white men here. I know of but one sort of quadruped, the field mice, of which this can also be said. It is commonly observed that almost no fields of grain and hay, and the making of

broad pastures and half-worn roads, which are almost immediately filled with weeds, has furnished the birds with an inexhaustible and unfailing harvest.

Birds suffer much harm from several quadrupeds, foxes, weasels, skunks, rats, etc., which catch them on their roosts, suck their eggs and kill their fledglings. Snakes also are fond of them and destroy many nests every season, in early summer subsisting almost alone upon eggs. All of these animals, particularly the foxes, skunks and serpents, are greatly reduced in numbers by the settlement of a region, although it must be confessed that their absence is somewhat compensated by the introduction of the domestic cats, which go foraging through the woods to the grief of all its feathered inhabitants. No longer in fear of their natural enemies, and learning that there is little reason to be apprehensive of harm from mankind, the small birds forsake their silent, shy manners, come out of the thickets where they have been hiding, and let their voices be heard in ringing tones, easily interpreted as notes of rejoicing at deliverance from fear, and thanksgiving for liberty to sing as loud as pleases them.

All small birds are more or less completely insectivorous, even the cone-billed seed-eaters having to feed their young with larvæ at first, and naturally congregate where this food is most abundantly supplied Th re would seem to be enough anywhere, but the plowing and manuring of the soil facilitates the growth and increase of such insects as go through their metamorphoses in the ground; and the culture of orchards furnishes an excellent resort for many boring and fruit-loving moths, beetles and the like, which find the best possible circumstances for their multiplication in the diseased trunks and juicy fruit of the apple, plum, cherry and peach. Here is another storehouse of bird's food, and no part of the farm has so many winged citizens.

The presence of horses, cattle and sheep, and the excellent opportunities offered to the flies and other insect tribes for the safe rearing of their eggs in the dung-hills and heaps of wet straw always lying about barns, attract a great colony of those minute bugs

upon which the fly-catching birds principally maintain themselves. The cattle-yard, therefore, forms a sort of game-preserve for such birds, and many species flock thither. Swallows are almost never found far from barns, the cow-bunting receives its name from its habit of constantly associating with cattle, and the king-bird finds the stable yard his most profitable hunting-ground. Near the habitations of men, small birds also enjoy protection from hawks and owls, which hesitate to venture away from the woods, and whose numbers are reduced, unwisely perhaps, by incessant persecution.

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The logic of the case is simple: birds will assemble chiefly where food for themselves and their young is in greatest abundance, and will thrive best where they are least exposed to enemies. These two prime conditions of prosperity, with many favorable concomitants, man's arts supply to the insessorial birds, which, on the other hand, suffer little direct injury from his contact. Yet some species seem little affected by the settlement of the country either in numbers or habits, while others increase rapidly on the first settlement of a region and then decrease again. Of this class are the prairie-hen and mallard. 'They find abundance of food in the corn and wheat fields; while the population is sparse and larger game so abundant they are hunted very little, but as the population increases they are gradually thinned out and become in some cases exterminated. Other birds, as the quail, are wholly unknown beyond the frontier; and only appear after the country has been settled a short time. Still others, woodland species, appear in regions where they were never known before as groves of trees are planted, and thick woods spring up on the prairies as soon as the ravages of the fires are checked."

Striking examples of how birds have accepted this tacit invitation to make men their confidants occur in the history of the swallows and swifts. Our purple martins spread themselves in Summer all over North America, but are becoming rare in New England, whence they seem to have been driven by the white-bellied swallows which have gradually grown more numerous, and

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which, preceding the martins in the spring, "preempt" all the nesting-boxes. Their natural resting-places were hollow trees and cavities in rocks, but now, throughout the whole breadth of the laud, it is rare to find martins resorting to such quarters except in the most remote parts of the Rocky Mountains. They have everywhere abandoned the woods and come into villages, towns and even cities, choosing to nest in communities about the eaves of houses and barns and in sheltered portions of piazzas, or to take possession of garden bird-boxes "where their social, familiar and confiding dispositions have rendered them general favorites." A very similar case is presented by the history of the chimney-swift, which finds a chimney a far more desirable residence than a hollow tree in the woods.

Other species of swallows afford still more striking examples of a change in life caused by association with man. Perhaps the most curious is the case of the eave swallow (Petrochelidon lunifrous). It remained undiscovered until 1820, when it was met with by Thomas Say, naturali t to Major Long's expedition to the Rocky Mountains. In 1825 it appeared at Fort Chippewa and built its nest under the eaves. Even earlier it had been seen on the Ohio river, at Whitehall, N. Y., and very soon after was found breeding in the Green Mountains, in Maine, in New Brunswick and on Anticosti Island, among the high limestone cliffs of that precipitous coast. It occurs also westward to the Pacific coast. It is hardly to be sup posed that these swallows were indigenous to some restricted locality in the West whence they suddenly made such a startling exodus, but rather that they had always existed in isolated spots suited to them all over the country, but so far apart and so uncommon that they were overlooked. The experience of the barn swallow has been very much the same; and the Rocky Mountain swallow, which breeds in far-separated colonies throughout the mountainous West, is fast following its example in scraping acquaintance with man. The Old World swallows and swifts have passed through a precisely similar civilizing process, only there the change of life has proceeded more slowly

and the new habits are more firmly fixed, for our birds in frequent individual instances still return to their wild manner of nesting.

The natural breeding place of all the three species I have mentioned is in caves and crevices of rocks-the irregularities and hollows of limestone cliffs affording them the best chances. "Swallows' Cave" at Nahant is remembered as one of their hospices. I have seen all three breeding together among the ragged ledges of Middle Park, Colorado; but considerable differences were noticeable between the houses of these uncivilized builders and those of their educated brethren at the East, who now would find it rather hard, I fancy, to "rough it" as did their ancestors.

Under the shelter of warm barns and with such an abundance of food at hand that they have had plenty of leisure "between meals" to cultivate their tastes and give scope to their ingenuity, our barn and eave swallows have shown a wondrous improve ment in architecture. The nests of the barn swallows which I saw in the little niches of the sulphur-rock at Hot Springs, in Colorado, consisted only of a loose bed of straw and feathers, for the hollow floors of the niches formed cavity and barrier for the safety of the eggs. Some nests resting on more ex. posed ledges had a rude foundation and rim of mud, but did not compare with the elaborate half-bowls lined with straw and feathers which the same species plaster so firmly against the rafters of our barns, or the large nest that is balanced on the beam, with edges built up so high that the callow young cannot tumble out or hardly climb out until they are quite ready to fly. Nevertheless the general character of the nest is the same; the eastern swallows have only made use of the superior advantages the barn and farmyard afford to perfect their idea. In the case of the barn swallow its civilization results practically in an addition to its work, since its nest is larger and more carefully made. On the other hand, its neighbor, the eave swallow, has saved labor by the change from wild life.

This latter species is sometimes called the republican swallow, because at the breeding season it gathers in extensive colonies, where

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