The little sitter soon became accustomed to my presence. When out of her nest, she sometimes came to the tree over my head, and answered when I spoke to her. In this way we carried on quite a long conversation, I imitating, so far as I was able, her own charming "sweet," and she replying in varied utterances, which, alas! were Greek to me.
I longed to watch the lovely and loving pair through their nesting; to see their rapture over their nestlings, their tender care and training, and the first flight of the goldfinch babies. But the inexorable task-master of us all, who proverbially "waits for no man," hurried off these last precious days of July with painful eagerness, and thrust before me the first of August, with the hot and dusty journey set down for that day, long before I was ready for it.
So I did not see the end of their love and labor myself, but the bird's wisdom in the selection of a site for her nursery was proved to be greater than mine, who had ventured to criticise her, by the fact that the nest, as I have been assured, escaped the young eyes of the neighborhood, and turned out its full complement of birdlings to add to next summer's beauty and song.
XXVI.
SOLITARY THE THRUSH.
"Solitary the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself,
Sings by himself a song."
Thus says the poet, with no less truth than beauty. No description could better express the spirit of the bird, the retiring habit and the love of quiet for which not alone the hermit, but the three famous singers of the thrush family are remarkable. We should indeed be shocked were it otherwise, for there is an indefinable quality in the tones of this trio, the hermit, wood, and tawny, that stirs the soul to its depths, and one can hardly conceive of them as mingling their notes with other singers, or becoming in any way familiar. In this peculiar power no bird-voice in our part of the world can compare with theirs. The brown thrush ranks high as a musician, the mockingbird leads the world, in the opinion of its lovers, and the winter wren thrills one to the heart. Yet no bird song so moves the spirit, no other—it seems to me—so intoxicates its hearer with rapture, as the solemn chant of "the hermit withdrawn to himself."
"Whenever a man hears it," says our devoted lover of Nature, Thoreau, "he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it there is a new world, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him."