“I say, you know,” said Hobart, enthusiastically, “I’d like to hear him, most awfully.”
“O you would—you would,” I agreed, and could say no more. In Spring my heart is always aching for the busy and the self-absorbed who do not seize opera glasses and post away to some place of trees.
Pelleas was fumbling in his portmonnaie.
“Look here,” he said beaming; “this is the list of the birds that we have seen this Spring. And we have not once stepped outside town, either.”
Hobart took our list and knitted his brows over it.
“I know robins and bluebirds,” he claimed proudly.
Pelleas nodded. “They are very nearly our dearest,” he said, “like daisies and buttercups. But we love the others, too—the rose and orchid and gardenia birds, Hobart. The grosbeaks and orioles and tanagers. You can’t think what a pleasure it is to see them come back one after another, as true to their dates as the stars—only now and then a bit earlier, for spice. The society columns in November are nothing in comparison—though of course they do very well. Yes, it’s quite like seeing the stars come back every year. Etarre and I go to the park after breakfast for the birds and to the roof of the house after dinner for the stars. March and April are wonderful months for the constellations.”
“O yes,” said Hobart Eddy, “yes. The Great Dipper and the North star and the Pleiades. I always know those.”
He was still holding the list, and Pelleas leaned forward and tapped on it, his face sparkling.
“Hobart,” he said, “give us a day next week. Let us leave home at six in the morning and get out in the real country and walk in the fields. We’ll undertake to show you the birds of this entire list! The hermit thrushes should be here by then—and I don’t know but the wood pewees and the orioles, the season is so early. And of course no end of the warbler family. We will all take glasses and Etarre shall give us the bird songs and I dare say we’ll see some nests. In the middle of the day we’ll hunt flowers—I could have been certain that I saw violet columbine a bit back on this road. And by next week we won’t be able to step for the rue anemone and the hepatica. You wouldn’t mind not picking them, Hobart?” asked Pelleas, anxiously. “We’re rather extreme when it comes to that, and we don’t pick them, you know. You wouldn’t mind that, I dare say?”