THE CARDINAL AND TANAGER.
The query about the scarlet bird in St. James's has brought many answers, one of peculiar interest. It comes from an American in Paris. He says, with much besides :— " Your correspondent's description would indicate that the bird is a cardinal. I always thought that cardinals only lived in the United States, but it may be that this bird has escaped from a cage. It is ono of the most beautiful birds imaginable. Some years ago I was secretary to the Mayor of New York, and at my office in the City Hall, which is a charming eighteenth-century building, set down in a small park in the midst of the grime and greyness of New York's down-town financial section, for two summers there was a group of cardinals which remained playing and roosting with the sparrows for several weeks. I think it must have been in the migrating season. These birds are, of course, not Imown in cities, and are extremely shy. . . . When I was a boy we caught a young cardinal, or " red bird," as the children and negroes called it, and kept it in a cage. It became quite tame, and would sing in a low, throaty croon. My old black nurse told me that if the bird over tasted human blood, it would die. My father laughed at this as being a negro super- stition, but one day the bird pecked me on the finger and drew a little bit of blood. Two or three days afterwards it sickened and died. My sister and I gave it the most elegant funeral we could contrive. There is another beautiful bird of this species which, I think, only lives in the United States—the red-winged blackbird. Its colour is iridescent jet black all over, with the exception of the top part of the wings, which are the same scarlet as the cardinal."
My correspondent alludes to the scarlet tanager, a bird of peculiar interest to me because the one personal letter that Theodore Roosevelt wrote to me contained an invitation to look for the tanager in the wood by his lovely house by Oyster Bay.
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