Mar., 1919 OLIVE THORNE MILLER 71 In the summer of 1891, Mrs. Miller, at my solicitation, went up to Locust Grove, New York, to study the Hermit Thrush on his breeding grounds in my home woods. Board was secured for her in the only farmhouse near the woods, but when I found her in her cramped bare white-washed room with her box of books standing in the middle of the floor because there was no other place for it, I was filled with misgivings, not lessened by the memory of the luncheon in a fashionable New York woman's club to which she had taken me a few weeks before. I soon knew her better, however. With a table for her books and her indispensable rocking chair to write in, she became enthusiastic about her room, for through a closed blind she could watch the unsuspecting birds promenading up and down the fence and feeding in the bushes outside. Her books surprised me. They were all either on birds or nature, ranging from Cones' Key and the latest good bird books--she said she would like to have a new one every week--to the natu?re poems of Emerson, Sill, and Sidney Lanier. Twenty-four years later she wrote "That summer at your old home is a lasting source of pleasant memories to me. I can recall the road through that deligi?t- ful woods almost foot by foot with charming details all the way, from the Thrushes' nest near the entrance to. the Cuckoo's nest near the exit, and all the delights between." To me the summer, as the one spent with her in Utah in 1892, is rich in cherished memories, for Mrs. Miller was the most delightful of field companions. No beauty of forest or meadow, sky, cloud, or mountain escaped her, and she loved birds as she did nature. When, fresh from .college, 1 saw her first, her hair was nearly white, but the discrepancy in our ages never seemed to occur to me, for she had the spirit and enthusiasm of youth, and we worked side by side as sisters. The familiar question, how did she come to be interested in birds, is easily answered superficially, though no one can say how much responsibility the old revolutionary Mann ancestor of Bunker Hill fame had in the bend of the twig. While her first bird book was not written until 1885, as a mother of four chil- dren she had learned the educational value of true stories and especially of na- ture tales and had previously published several juvenile books dealing with birds and animals--Little Folks in Feathers and Fur being perhaps one of the best known. Then, her children being grown, and her time at her disposal, a fortuitous circumstance gave a flew angle to her nature interest. An old friend from Chicago, the twenty-year home of her married life, Mrs. Sara l?Iubbard, a pioneer bird worker, came to visit her in her Brooklyn home, and together they went to Prospect Park, then as now rich in birds, and she caught the en- thusiasm which lasted throughout her remaining years, inducing her to leettzre, and to give bird classes as well as to write a half shelf full of bird books. In her field work,' special bi3ds had a peculiar attraction for her, among them the Solitaire and the Phainopepla. "How I envy you the music of the Solitaire !!' she wrote me in answer to a letter from its breeding grounds. "It is the most wonderful song in the world, I think." And when after visiting her married son in California, she was about returning to Brooklyn, she wrote that if she could find the Solitaire in Colorado she would give up her overland ticket and perhaps spend the rest of the summer studying him. The Phainopepla was the'burden of her song for years, associated as it was with her thoughts of California, which was her Mecca long before she was able to make it her home. "I am suffering from my old malady, California fever," she wrote me. And from Bailey Island, Maine, in 1902--"You see I
