There is the sad-voiced phœbe! Even she forgets her customary dismal cry at certain times when flies are winging their midday dance on invisible floors that never were waxed. It is when she takes a "flat stand" an the roof-corner and "bewails her lot" that her notes are utterly disconsolate. Take a couple of phœbes on a cloudy day, just after "one's folks have gone away from home on a long visit," and nothing lends an aid to sorrow like their melancholy notes. Really we do believe phœbe thinks he is singing. But he has mistaken his calling. Some of the goldfinches have a plaintive note, especially while nesting, which appeals to the gloomy side of the listener, if he chance to have such a side. Were Coleridge listening to either of these, the phœbe or the goldfinch, he would doubtless say, in answer to the charge of sadness:
"A melancholy bird? Oh, idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy."
And he would have us believe the birds are "merry" when they sing.
And so they shall be merry. Even the mourning dove shall make us glad. She does not intend to mourn; the appearance of sadness being only the cadence of her natural voice. She has not learned the art of modulation; though the bluebird and the robin and all the thrushes call her attention to the matter every year.
If one will closely watch a singer, unbeknown to him, when he is in the very act, one may note the varying expression of the body, from the tip of his beak to the tip of his tail. Sometimes he will stand still with closely fitting plumage and whole attitude on tiptoe. Sometimes he will crouch, and lift the plumage, and gyrate gracefully, or flutter, or soar off at random on quick wings.
Sometimes he sings flat on the breast like a song-sparrow, or again high up in the sky like the lark. However he sings, heaven bless the singer! "The earth would be a cheerless place were there no more of these."
But legend tells the story of singing birds in its own way—the story of a time long, long eons ago, when not a single bird made glad the heart of anything or anybody.
True, there were some large sea birds and great walking land birds, too deformed for any one to recognize as birds in these days, but there was no such thing as a singing bird.
One day there came a great spring freshet, the greatest freshet ever dreamed of, and all the land animals sought shelter in the trees and high mountains. But the water came up to the peaks and over the treetops, and sorrow was in all the world. Suddenly a giraffe, stretching its long neck in all directions, espied a big boat roofed over like a house. The giraffe made signs to the elephant, and the elephant gave the signal, as elephants to this day do give signals that are heard for many a mile, so they say! Then there came a scurrying for the big boat. A few of all the animals got on board, by hook or crook, and the rain was coming down in sheets. All at once along came the lizards, crawling up the sides of the boat and hunting for cracks and knot-holes to crawl into, just as lizards are in the habit of doing on the sly to this day. But not a crack or knot-hole could they find in the boat's side; for the loose places, wide enough for a lizard to flatten himself into, had all been filled up with gum, or something.
Then the lizards began to hiss, exactly the way they hiss to this day when they are frightened; and the big animals inside the boat poked out their noses to see what was to pay.