80 SYLVAN SECRETS. 



the cries of birds it has never seen and whose 

 voices it has never heard. I have heard it do 

 this. Not only the power to mimic is heredi- 

 tary, but there, hngering in the bird's nature, 

 is the memory, so to call it, of the voices it is 

 born to mimic — the voices its ancestors mim- 

 icked ten thousand years ago. 



It has been the fashion for men of science 

 to make light of the common legend of the 

 power of birds and other animals to foretell 

 rain and other meteorological phenomena; 

 but I long ago learned to credit it in a large 

 degree. Birds are not always right in their 

 predictions, because weather-threats are not 

 always carried out. The yellow-billed cuckoo 

 is more vociferous when the barometer indi- 

 cates rain, but often the barometer fails 

 to fetch the shower. The tree-frog, another 

 sort of song-bird, squeals and chirps at the 

 first indication of a rain -atmosphere, but the 

 rain may fail to come. Birds sing with em- 

 phasis after a shower, as if they felt as much 

 refreshed as the violets, and the clover, and 

 the maple-leaves, and no doubt they do thus 

 express some sense of delight in their revivi- 

 fied surroundings, just as they have sung or 

 cackled in pleasant anticipation of the same 

 before it came. 



I have seen a mocking-bird eat the best 

 part of a luscious pear or apricot, and then 

 leap to the topmost spray of the tree and sing 

 as if it would trill itself into fragments for 

 very joy of the feast. The shrike cannot 

 sing, but after impaling a grasshopper on a 

 thorn he will make a hideous effort to be 

 melodious over the deed. So the bluejay will 

 utter its softest and sweetest "oodle-doo, oo- 

 dle-doo," as soon as it has wiped its bill clear 

 of the blood-stain received in murdering a 



