The silence! Webster continued:
"Another naturalist thinks the song is:
"'Che che che peery peery peery.'"
Webster's father raised his eyebrows—he had no hair to raise—at Webster's mother: a sign that their graduate was beginning to celebrate his vacation.
"My son," he said, "when I was a little fellow in school, one of the reading lessons was a poem called 'Try, Try Again.' Perhaps the bird is working along that line."
"Thomas Jefferson followed a bird for hours in the woods," said Webster, with dignity: he somehow felt rebuked. "And for twenty years he tried to catch sight of another."
"Don't let me come between you and Thomas Jefferson," said Webster's father, waving his hand toward his son in protest. "God forbid that I should come between any two such persons as Daniel Webster and Thomas Jefferson!"
"The government at Washington," observed Webster stoutly, "is behind the Kentucky warbler."
"Then, my son, I advise you to get behind the Government."
The rusty bell at the little front door went off with a sound like the whirr of a frightened prairie chicken. The breakfast maid, also the cook, also the maid of all work, also a unit of the standardised population of disservice and discontent, entered and pushed a bill at Webster's father.