So indeed they might, even if I had seen them; but this, alas, I could not make him understand. So he treated me—his best friend—exactly as he treated the nest-robber and the bird-shooter.
I shall never know whether that nest contained eggs or young birds; or whether perchance there was no nest at all, and I had been deceived from the first by the most artful and beguiling of birds. And through all this I had never once squarely seen the chat I had been following.
"Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but, an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery."
XX.
ON THE LAWN.
The first thing that strikes an Eastern bird-student in the Rocky Mountain region, as I have already said, is the absence of the birds he is familiar with. Instead of the chipping sparrow everywhere, one sees the lazuli-painted finch, or the Rocky Mountain bluebird; in place of the American robin's song, most common of sounds in country neighborhoods on the Atlantic side of the continent, is heard the silver bell of the towhee bunting, sometimes called marsh robin, or the harsh "chack" of Brewer's blackbird; the music that opens sleepy eyes at daybreak is not a chorus of robins and song-sparrows, but the ringing notes of the chewink, the clear-cut song of the Western meadow-lark, or the labored utterance of the black-headed grosbeak; it is not by the melancholy refrain of the whippoorwill or the heavenly hymns of thrushes that the approach of night is heralded, but by the cheery trill of the house wren or the dismal wail of the Western wood-pewee.
Most of all does the bird-lover miss the thrushes from the feathered orchestra. Some of them may dwell in that part of the world,—the books affirm it, and I cannot deny it,—but this I know: one whose eye is untiring, and whose ear is open night and day to bird-notes, may spend May, June, July, yes, and even August, in the haunts of Rocky Mountain birds, and not once see or hear either of our choice singing thrushes.