[CHAPTER XIV]
BOBOLINK
"June! dear June! Now God be praised for June."
'Nuff said; June's bridesman, poet o' the year,
Gladness on wings, the bobolink is here;
Half hid in tiptop apple-blooms he sings,
He climbs against the breeze with quiverin' wings.
Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair.
Runs down, a brook o' laughter, through the air.
Lowell.
He was just a bird to start with, half blackbird and the other half sparrow, with some of the meadow-lark's ways of getting along. As to the naming of him, everybody settled that matter at random, until one day he grew tired of being called nicknames and named himself.
Think of having "skunk-blackbird" called after a fellow when he deserved the title no more than half a dozen of his feathered friends! He could never imagine what gave him the disagreeable epithet, unless it be his own individual hatred for the animal whose name clung to him like mud.
To be sure, the coat of the bird was striped, something like that of the detestable beastie; but so were the coats of many other birds, and he could never tell why he should be called a blackbird, either.
True, he loved the marshes for personal reasons; but who has seen a blackbird twist its toes around a reed stalk and sing like mad?
