ALTHOUGH this snivelling humbug, April, as I write, has spread out one of the bluest and softest of skies, and is coaxing the leaves to unroll their little green packages, and the grass to shoot up through the brown sod, and the birds to come up from the warm South, I can only say with the Rabbi in Uriel Acosta, "We have seen all this before."

She has dallied so long with that wild roysterer, March, that there is suspicion in the hem of her garments. She has indulged in boisterous and disgraceful revelries with him. She has listened to his bold license of speech. She has allowed him entrance at unseasonable hours. And she comes from the contact, no longer the coy, bashful, weeping maiden of yore, but a bold, unblushing hoyden, clothing herself to-day in her old beauty and softness, but still with the vile breath of March upon her lips.

And, worst of all, while couched in the fierce passion of March, she forgot her old friends who have never forgotten her, and so the buds were blasted, and the birds who had listened to her syren song died, and the flowers turned over and went back to their odorous sleep; and the arbutus which should be now showing its little pink and white face, under the dead leaves, shrunk back affrighted from her, as she went noisily through the woods, boasting her shame in the robes with which March covered her nakedness as he thrust her away.

It is only a few Sundays ago that I told you of the little blue trumpeter who was heralding spring from the dry boughs. He, too, was sacrificed, and yesterday I saw him lying upon his back in the brown stubble, his claws bent with the pain of the cold, the light of his eyes quenched, his song forever hushed, and his soul fled to the Bird Heaven, where all the good blue birds, robins, orioles, and nightingales go; where they sing forever among the asphodels and in the lotuses to those who loved them and cared for them among the elms and the oaks; and where all the little captives who are caged here below regain their liberty and soar and sing untrammelled.

The blue trumpeter suffered the fate of all reformers. He came before his time. He was heralding the truth before the world was ready for it, and he died unheard and neglected. And hundreds of other heralds are lying dead to-day in the fields, victims to the merciless rigor of the rain and the snow and the cold.

And I therefore plead for all the birds who have come to us from the South. Shelter them whenever you can. Feed them and care for them. Summer, without its choir of birds, will be as blank as heaven without stars, a house without a child, a garden without flowers. The clearest indications of Paradise we get on earth, are the birds, the flowers, and the little children, and the man or woman who doesn't love them will have a trying time in Paradise, if he or she ever gets there.

I have never seen it recorded that they have any of these things in the other place.

Therefore, again I say, deal gently with the birds and the flowers, for not a sparrow falls to the ground without His notice, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like the lilies of the fields.

April 17, 1868.