preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub.
And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White Birch Group.
“Who’s doing it? Oh-h! who’s doing it–answering?” breathed Pemrose Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn’t altogether bad for her, either. “Oh! it’s you, is it? Where’s the whistle–the bird-caller’s whistle?”
“Here. Look!” A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the iris of her eyes–corresponding to the many freckles upon her small face, with a luminous quality added–opened a volunteering palm.
In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody in the breast of the thrush as to draw–actually draw–the hermit himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly, a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer–the mate, who had answered him.
“Romeo and Juliet!” laughed the Guardian. “Such a dear little feathered Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold–and a fairy oboe in his breast! Juliet–” she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden–“Juliet answering from her balcony, this mound!”
“Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him with!” breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. “No doubt he’s saying to himself: ‘Shucks! Where’s that hermit–or hermitess–’” merrily, “‘with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?’”
“Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?” pleaded the visitors together. “It’s won-der-ful! We’ll be as still–as still as a nun’s chapel!”
And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which answered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock:
| “the song complete, With such a wealth of melody sweet, As never the organ pipe could blow And never musician think or know!” |