498 SONG OP THE EED-EYED GEEENLET 



wonted agreeable manner. The Jamaican Flycatchers in gen- 

 eral, he says, " are not very vociferous, but this is pertinacious 

 in its tritouous call, repeating it with energy every two or three 

 seconds. . . . On the 26th of March, on my return to Bluefields, 

 after a visit to Spanish town, I heard its well-known voice, but 

 my lad had noticed it a week before. From this time, every 

 grove, I might almost say every tree, had its bird, uttering, 

 with incessant iteration and untiring energy, from its umbra- 

 geous concealment, — ' Sweet John! — John-towJiit! — Sweet- Jolin- 

 to-wliit ! — Jolin-thcliit ! — Sweet- John-to — whit ! ' I can scarcely 

 understand how the call can be written ' Whip-tomkelly ', as the 

 accent, if I may say so, is most energetic on the last syllable. 

 Nor have I ever heard this appellation given to it in Jamaica.[*] 

 After July we rarely hear ^ John-to-whit ^ — , but, '■to-whit — 

 to-u'hoo\ and sometimes a soft, simple chirp, or sip, sip, whispered 

 so gently as scarcely to be audible." All this is as applicable 

 to the Eed-eyed Greenlet, mut. mut., as if it had been written 

 for the latter — even to the criticism that ' Whip-tom-kelly' is 

 an inept designation. Though "Wilson says: " On attentively 

 listening for some time to this bird in his full ardor of song, it 

 requires but little of imagination to fancy that you hear it 

 pronouuce these words," — Nutta'i has, to my way of thinking, 

 rendered the song in a much more graphic manner, in saying: 

 "... the most lively or accidental fit of imagination, never 

 yet, in this country, conceived of such an association of sounds. 

 I have already remarked, indeed, that this singular call is, in 

 fact, sometimes uttered by the Tufted Titmouse. When our 

 Vireo sings slow enough to be distinctly heard, the following 

 sweetly warbled phrases, variously transposed and tuned, may 

 often be caught by the attentive listener: Hshooe peicee peeai 

 miisiJc ^du ^du ^du, Hshoove ^hSre Vi^e, hear hdre, hear hdre, ^kHng 

 ^ritshard, ^p''shegru Hshevu, Hsheevoo, HshUvee peeait ^peroi. The 

 whole delivered almost without any sensible interval, with earn- 

 est animation, in a iiathetic, tender and pleasing strain, well 

 calculated to produce calm and thoughtful reflection in the sen- 

 sitive mind." I witness the fidelity of this description, and I 

 can even catch the rhythm or movement of the piece in the 

 quaint syllables Nuttall uses, though I must confess that I fail 

 to gain from them the slightest notion of the timbre or quality 



* The name is traditional, having come down from the fathers : see Sloane, 

 Browne, Edwards (who figures it unmistakably, pi. 253), and the rest. 



