The yesterday's bird of mad music is to-day the bird of mad appetite. True, they may call out "chink" in passing, but "chink" means "chock-full," and people who delight in bobolink table-fare recognize the true meaning of the note.
Bobolink has forgotten to call his own name, so he answers to any nickname the epicurean lovers of him please to call him by—"rice-bird," "reed-bird," "butter-bird," anything or everything that is appropriate. And "'possum" sits up on a stump and laughs.
Never mind, 'possum, it's your turn all the time. If bobolink could imitate you in the art of making-believe dead, he would fare better—until folks found him out. People have little use for a dead bobolink, unless shot-gun or snare be in at the death. But bobolinks never seem to learn of 'possums or anybody else. They follow in the wake of their ancestor bobolinks, over the selfsame route to the South; dining in the selfsame rice-fields; swinging on the selfsame reed stalks, exactly as the reed stalks come up each year in the place of last season's petiole.
It's a sad, pathetic tale. But wait! Spring is coming in the steps of last year's spring-time; over the selfsame route, to the selfsame end and fortunes. With the spring will return the bobolinks, as many as have survived disaster. Before you know it he will be calling himself in the meadows, exactly as he called last spring. The seasons and the birds are but echoes of themselves.
Robert o' Lincoln, with his latest striped coat, will sway on the stems and wait for his sweetheart. He will flirt with neither sparrow nor thrush until she arrives. He is true, is the bobolink! So is the polecat, growing lean under his winter stump, and licking his lips at the sound of the farmer calling to his children, "The skunk-blackbird has come!"
"When you can pipe in that merry old strain,
Robert o' Lincoln, come back again."
[CHAPTER XV]
AT NESTING-TIME