ONE gray February day, when dirty patches of snow are still lingering on the north side of rocks and walls, as you gaze across a dreary landscape, you espy a bit of bright color on the bar-post that brightens up your spirit. 'Tis the first bluebird, and that means that spring is coming. His cheery little ditty seems to say, "Spring is coming, spring is coming, spring is here." He has been farther south during the winter, for he seldom stays in Massachusetts in December and January and he thinks it a little chilly just now, for his feathers are all fluffed up around him so that he looks like an animated dumpling.

He has come back to locate his nest site—to see first if the old nest hole of past years is suitable, for he is a great home-lover, and, if not, to select a new one.

In March you will see the bluebirds often investigating rotten bar-posts, hollow cedars, old woodpecker holes, and decayed apple-tree stumps. And in the latter part of the month the females are with them.

Then one April day Mr. Bluebird sings always from a limb of a certain apple-tree, and down in the trunk, in an abandoned woodpecker's hole, are four pretty light blue eggs.

Every old orchard has its family of bluebirds, and they come back to the same nest every year until something happens to scare them away from it. A rotten bar-post or fence rail is a promising site also, and they peck out a hole with their short bills and round it out quite as neatly as that feathered carpenter, the woodpecker. When they get in a little ways you may see the chips flying out of the aperture, though no worker is in sight, and when it is almost done every now and then a blue head will pop out with a beak full of loose wood, which is tossed away. Then a few clean chips are left and the bird's own soft down lines the home.

Often they will make use of wooden boxes set on poles or placed in the trees for their benefit. They are very quiet, peaceful birds, so the entrance to their homes should never be much larger than their own small bodies require for admittance.

The scrubby cedars that grow along the New England coast make excellent nooks and corners for the bluebird's home and the berries provide him with food late in the season. I have even found a pair nesting in a cedar grove on the extreme end of a rocky point exposed to the full force of the southeast storms that sweep up Buzzard's bay. Usually, however, they prefer the green fields and orchards of further inland.

One pair for five or six years nested in a hollow about twelve inches deep formed in the crotch where a cedar tree branched into two parts. It could not have been a comfortable or well-chosen home, for it was open to the weather at the top and it would seem as if it must be flooded in a heavy rain-storm. But it was only abandoned by the birds when it had become known to every boy and egg collector in the village as the hereditary estate of this family.

During April and May the bluebird is everywhere visible and audible, but in midsummer he is not so often seen. He is essentially a bird of the spring with us. His familiar contemporaries are the catbird and the robin, but he is the earliest in the year of them all. Sometimes, though not often, he stops all winter with us, and his red breast warms the winter landscape which it dares to challenge.

See him dash from that old fence post after a mouthful of flies or gnats; or hopping from twig to twig in the cedar tree, selecting the choicest of the spicy berries. Sometimes he will venture in among the crowd of talkative sparrows that are harvesting the crumbs in your dooryard, but if they dispute his right he keeps away. The piece of suet hung in the tree near the bird-box, however, is his own, and he views the intruding buntings and trespassing jays from his front porch or dormer window with much indignation.

However, he says very little, uses no bad language like that of the jay, and soon regains the sereneness of temper natural to him. And we like him all the better for it, for, although it is not nice to be imposed upon and we like to see offenders get their deserts, the one who takes life cheerfully and uncomplainingly overlooks or forgets the wrongs he cannot right is the one we like to have as a friend.