396 The Ohio Naturalist. [Vol. Ill, No. 5, 



illustrate my meaning. I have verified the experience through 

 several Aprils. The first hearing was in this manner. For a 

 long time I had been sitting still to watch the Hermit flitting and 

 returning among the naked cop.ses by the old river-bed ; and 

 what with his nearness and the fresh April song about me, the 

 memory of his song came to me clear and clearer. Let not Science 

 reproach me for this ! — I was fancying what old law, what jealous 

 traveler's silence on the way to the happier north his home, kept 

 unuttered in the bird's white breast that high romance, the voice 

 of our best dreamer, even the memory of which made sunset flash 

 -across the mountain lakes to me. The memory, the fancy, grew 

 so vividly upon me that I smiled to find my.self placing actually 

 somewhere, across the Olentang}-, upstream, downstream, the 

 phantom singing of my own creation. Then I woke to the reali- 

 zation that it was an actual song, a Hermit Thrush really singing, 

 but very far away. And last of all, I saw the dappled throat of 

 my Thrush, which was always here and there about the leafless 

 thickets, near me in the sun, saw his throat ruffling, and knew 

 that he was the singer of the song that .seemed, across the river 

 or across the j^ears, so far awa3\ 



I ask pardon for such unedifying rhapsody, but the quality 

 thus suggested is characteristic of the autumnal songseason. 

 Some birds apparently change the form as well as the qualit}' of 

 their song, making of it an entirely new composition ; the Bob- 

 white, for instance, and (I think) the Chickaclee ; and the Caro- 

 lina Wren in September has often set me hunting down a new 

 song, surprising me at length to find him, that piper of indomita- 

 ble and far-ringing cheerfulness, now singing a secret bubbling 

 continuous Goldfinch-like song. But most of our birds, without 

 changing the form of their song, change the tone-color as I have 

 described. So the Catbird sings, so the Brown Thrush ; at your 

 shoulder, may be. but seeming a half mile away ; so sing our most 

 frequent autumnal vocalists, the Meadowlarks, Cardinals, Song- 

 sparrows, Robins ; half-song, a whisper-song, an echo, a ventril- 

 oquism. It is, I suppose, simply that they sing with half- voice, 

 as we might hum to ourselves a melody that haunts us through 

 the day's work. 



But it is easier for me to deal with effects than with causes, and 

 I shall not this time apologize, for these are my last words. The 

 autumnal song seems to me not less beautiful than that of April ; 

 not the same triumphant, liut memorial, charged with emotion, 

 an art wrecked by its own beautiful joy ; autumn's fit utterance, 

 when even Anosia, the red monarch of all the butterflies, migrates 

 among the departing birds and the uiu'eturning leaves ; and when 

 always across the sky, in October, in November, as long as the 

 Witch-Hazel is in flower, the Bluebirds play their pipes of pa.ssage. 



