“Wait a bit,” said he, “I should call him a robin.”
“He’s got no red breast,” I brought forth, out of the depth of my ignorance.
“He has a reddish spot under each ear,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “and mark how his tail turns up.”
“I am no ornithologist,” I said. “His tail turns up.”
“How little one realizes,” quoth Thisbe, pensively, “that a bird has ears.”
“I think,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “that I can decide this matter,” and disappeared into the house.
“He has gone to get a book,” said Delia, “that will settle you, dear lady, you and your thrush,” and presently he came out triumphant, as she said, with “Wanderings of a Naturalist in India.”
“‘Although differing altogether in the colour of its plumage from the European robin,’” he read aloud, “‘there is great similarity in their habits. It frisks before the door, and picks up crumbs, jerking its tail as it hops along. How often have associations of home been brought to mind by seeing this pretty little warbler pursuing its gambols before the door of an Eastern bungalow!’”
“Well,” said I, “not often, because of course we didn’t recognize it, but in future they always will be,” and at that moment the pretty little warbler put himself in profile on the paling before us, and threw out his little waistcoat, and threw back his little head and whistled, and we all cried out that he had established his identity, there could not be any doubt of it, in face of that brave and dainty attitude. There are some things a bird never could pick up.
So it is a robin that has gone to housekeeping there in the close-cut banksia. He is a devoted mate; he knows by heart, perhaps by experience, how necessary it is to encourage, dull little wives on the nest; and, neglectful of the hard-beating storm, he perches as near her as may be and sends out every dulcet variation he can think of. To the prisoner in the house it seems a supreme note of hope, this bird singing in the rain.