In teaching them to sing, the voice, the piano, and flute are all good teachers. The patient and music-loving Germans teach all birds to sing. It should be begun in the morning early, when the bird is hungry; and his lesson should not last more than an hour.
Early and regular attendance, gentleness and kindness, are the rationale of bird-tending, as of nearly everything else!
Those half-captives, the pigeons, should be around every country house. How beautiful they are in Venice! the pigeons of St. Mark, which have swooped about that storied piazza for so many years, because regularly fed there. All boys should learn to cultivate them; to have the lovely shifting luster of their necks lighting up the ground and making gay the twilight. How proud and pompous are the pouters! how gentle the ringdoves! and how pretty the whole family! Peacocks are very stately visitors, and, except for their horrid shrieks, are especially to be commended. The old ruffled turkey-gobbler has his charms; and the pages of Hawthorne teach us how very amusing a group of hens and chickens may become. We advise every family to have as many birds as they can possibly feed; for every bird is a study, from the blink-eyed owl which hides in the fir-tree, to the poor old goose that quacks and hobbles toward the pond. Indeed, the æsthetics are all pretending that the goose is the most beautiful of them all!—a perfect love, a type, is a goose, since Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway came in. But we still prefer the stately swan, of which splendid specimens are now beginning to add their attractions to our inland lakes. The goose is all very well in her way, but the swan is better.
[XV.]
PICNICS.
Perhaps it is not well to class among Home Amusements a series of entertainments which imply, at first sight, the getting away from home. But, as the basket of luncheon has to be packed at home, and the best part of a picnic is the getting home again, we must be permitted a divergence.
It is curious to see how emphatically fond of picnics the Americans are. A universal national hunger seems to seize the tired cit as the first warm day of May beams upon us. They “babble of green fields.” Best of all charities those which send the poor children off, on boats and trains, for a whiff of pure air! It is the blessed privilege of the rich to thin out the crowded tenement, and to send the overplus of an irrepressible civilization back to Nature for a moment.
But, for a Home Amusement in the country, what can compare with the joy of getting ready for a picnic? The baskets for the provisions (and be sure, Mary, not to forget the salt or the sugar), the coffee-pot that will stand being poked down into the wood-coals, the fine old swinging iron kettle, the bread, the knives, and the pail of ice. Ah!
Then, as to carriages. Not the luxurious cushioned barouche, but the shabbiest old rattletraps about the place are the proper ones. A good old hay-wagon is the very best—if it have hay in it. It may do very well at Newport for the luxurious to drive out to one of Mr. Bennett’s picnics in a four-in-hand or a drag, or a Victoria or a barouche; but in the country take the buckboard, the old Rockaway wagon, which holds nine—the more the merrier—the farm-wagon, and the market-cart. Filled with youth, beauty, and jollity, these become the chariots of Apollo.