Have you ever heard this? It suggests nothing so much as elf-land music; I know no song exactly like it. You seem to hear a bird warbling most delightfully, but it is far, far away. You raise your eyes, and scan the trees around, but no singing bird can you discover; you decide it must be farther off—but what a haunting charm there is about it.
Then it ceases. Mr. Robin is hoping that you have understood what he has been saying. But no, the obtuse human just goes on weeding the path as before; so the Whisper Song starts again. This time you think it resembles a very mellow musical box shut up in some distant room.
Suddenly you see him, singing straight at you, so close to your hand that it gives you quite an uncanny feeling for the moment; and you wonder: Who is he—what is he—that he should be saying all this to me, obviously to me, and to no one else but me?
Robin doesn’t encourage you in daydreams, however, he means business; and once he sees that he has secured your undivided attention, he discards the Whisper Song and comes to the point. Down on to the path he drops, seizes an unwary worm that your energy has brought to light; then tosses it over scornfully and flirts a contemptuous tail, which says as plainly as any tale that was ever told, “Is that the best worm you can offer a gentleman? Pouf!”
He eats it nevertheless.
And so he follows me round the place; I never garden alone. If at first I cannot see him, I whistle a quiet call; invariably I hear the Whisper Song in response, and there he is—waiting, watching, missing nothing, with his tiny throat feathers vibrating and quivering as he strives to let me into bird-land secrets, and tells me lots and lots of wonderful things that as yet I am too dull-witted to understand.
Then there are the blackbirds—for individuality they are hard to beat; though I admit they are always reproving someone or something, with their “Chutter, chut, chut!”
I never knew a bird with as many grudges and grievances as Augustus seems to have. He “chut-chuts” at me if I’m late with his breakfast, at Abigail when she ventures to gather a few raspberries, at the dog whenever he sees him, at the little colt for scampering down the meadow, at the cuckoo when his voice breaks—I’ve heard him get up after all the family had gone to bed, and roundly abuse a poor July cuckoo who had developed a bad stutter—and every night about sundown he admonishes the world in general, from his pulpit in a pine, despite the fact that Martha has put the children to bed and is trying to get them to sleep, and that every other masculine blackbird for acres round is discoursing on the same subject.
But the poor thing has had his troubles. The first time we really distinguished Augustus and Martha (who monopolise my bedroom window ledge, and the pinks and pansy border) from Claude and Juliet (who patronise the biggest mountain ash, and consider the white and red currants and the snails in the snapdragon bed their particular perquisites) was when the former (that means Augustus and Martha, you know) built in the old plum tree that hangs partly over the green and gold grotto. Though it has plenty of snowy-white flowers on its dark stems in the spring, it has been too neglected to produce much fruit; but it makes up in flowering ivy and heavenly-scented honeysuckle for any other deficiencies. And it was in this tangled mass of loveliness that Augustus and Martha first set up housekeeping. (Augustus being always recognizable by reason of one grey feather.)