followed after a moment or two, perhaps, by a shrill and noisy "Piff! piff! piff!"—as some sudden dissension broke out, or some suspicious cat, or other marauder, came near the nest tree. The crows, always bold in the early morning hours, would come into the Balm o' Gileads after birds' nests, sometimes, before we were astir. I remember that Addison once cut my nap short by firing his gun from the chamber window at a crow that was sneaking into the Balm o' Gileads after young robins. He shot the crow, but my own ear rang for more than two hours, and I was so confused for a time, that I scarcely knew enough to dress myself.
There is no combination of letters which more nearly represents the song notes of the robin than the above, I think, although many attempts have been made to render them into some semblance of human language. Addison always insisted that they said, "Dew-lip, Dew-lip; bill it, bill it, bill it;"—the whole song being an exhortation of the robin to his mate whose name was Dew-lip, to get up and bill it for worms. Halstead had somewheres got hold of a medical rendering of the song, by a waggish doctor who declared that the robins were constantly admonishing him in the line of his profession:—
"Kill 'em, cure 'em; physic, physic."
But the rest of us scouted this partisan interpretation.
The explosive, alarmingly energetic danger cry of, "Piff, piff," which will so suddenly wake the entire vicinity of the nest, is at times modified and given quite a different intonation, as if to express discontent: "Fibb, fibb!" and sometimes even loneliness: "Pheeb, pheeb!"—very mournful.
During a shower, accompanied by wind in heavy wrenching gusts, in the night, that summer, a nest containing four young robins fell from a maple, a few rods down the lane, into the grass beneath. Theodora heard the outcry of the old robins, blended with the thunder and the roar of the rain, in the night, and noticing their mournful notes next morning about the tree, made search and discovered the calamity. Addison and she gathered up the nestlings and putting them in an old berry box, lined with grass and cotton batting, tied the improvised nest to a branch of the maple. For an hour or two the scolding old birds would not go near the thing, but later in the day we saw them, feeding their young in it, quite as if nothing had happened to disturb them.
In the rear of the wagon-house there grew a good-sized mountain ash or round-wood tree which nearly every fall was crowned with the usual great bright-red clusters of bitter berries. Late in October the robins always came for those berries, and sometimes a flock of fifty or sixty would assemble. We often tried to frighten the birds away, for the red clusters are beautiful in winter, but for a long time we never succeeded in saving them. The robins would linger about for a week, or more, rather than leave a single bunch of those berries ungathered. Addison once placed a stuffed cat-skin in the tree, at which the robins scolded vociferously for a day or two from the neighboring shrubs and fence; but they suddenly discovered the deception and got all the remaining berries in the course of a single forenoon. Addison was boasting a little of the success of his ruse when, at dinner, Ellen quietly bade him go look at the tree. The robins had already got every berry and gone, leaving the feline effigy in the bare tree, an object of mirth and ridicule. A scarecrow made of old clothes, stuffed with hay and crowned by an old hat, set up in the tree the following year, served no better purpose. Ellen and Theodora then hung an old tin clothes boiler in the tree, and arranged a jangling bunch of tin ware inside it, with a long line running to the kitchen window, where they could conveniently give it a jerk every few minutes. This device answered well for a day or two, and it was very amusing to see those robins scatter from the tree, when the line was pulled. They were some little time making up their minds concerning it, and would sit on the back fence and rub their beaks on the posts, at intervals, as if making a great effort to comprehend the cause of the "manifestations" inside the boiler. No doubt the more superstitious ones attributed it to "spirits." Skepticism increased, however, and by the second day one unbelieving red fellow refused to budge, till the line was jerked twice, and soon after that they wore the girls out, pulling it, and got the berries as usual. The year after, Addison saved the berries by stretching one of his cherry-tree nets over the round-wood tree, in October. It chanced, however, that the tree failed to produce a crop of berries the next season and died a year or two later;—a circumstance which Gram hinted, mysteriously, might be a "dispensation," on account of our persistent efforts to thwart the robins. It should be taken into account, however, that the mountain-ash is not long-lived, and that this was already an old tree.
In a large maple, down the lane, a preacher-bird sang every day in June and until into August, generally loudest and most continuously, from eleven till two o'clock. On coming to or going from our dinner, we would often hear him: sometimes he sang in the morning and now and then after supper. This bird—it is the red-eyed vireo—has an oddly persistent, pragmatic note, which can hardly be called singing, being more like declamation and somewhat disconnected and disjoint, as if the "preacher" were laying down certain truths and facts and seeking by constant iteration to impress them upon dullards. Betwixt every one of these short sentences, there is a little pause, as if the preacher were waiting for the truth to strike home to his hearers; but if the bird is watched, he will be seen to be picking and hopping about on the branch which serves him as a pulpit, snapping up a bug or a seed here and there. Yet his discourse goes steadily on, by the half hour, or hour, sometimes with a rising inflection, as after a question, sometimes the falling, as having given an irrefutable answer, himself. Once the idea that the bird is preaching has entered a listener's mind, he can never shake it off.
"My hearers—where are you?—You know it—you see it.—Do you hear me?—Do you believe it?" And so on, upon the same insistent and at length tiresome strain.
"Oh, I do wish that preacher bird would stop," Ellen would exclaim at times. "He has 'preached' steadily all the forenoon!"