12 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
bird, and before I could get my attention 
rightly fixed upon the song it had ended. 
Something of the rare aroma, so to speak, 
of the curiously modulated trills and quavers 
lingered in my memory, however, along with 
Uncle Jo’s graphic description of the bird’s 
actions. After that I was on the lookout for 
an opportunity to verify the negro’s state- 
ments. 
I have not exactly kept the date of my first 
actual observation, but it was late in April, or 
very early in May; for the crab-apple trees, 
growing wild in the Georgian hills, were in 
full bloom, and spring had come to stay. I 
had been out since the first sparkle of day- 
light. The sun was rising, and I had been 
standing quite still for some minutes, watch- 
ing a mocking-bird that was singing in a 
snatchy, broken way, as it fluttered about in a 
thick-topped crab-apple tree thirty yards dis- 
tant from me. Suddenly the bird, a fine speci- 
men, leaped like a flash to the highest spray 
of the tree and began to flutter in a trembling, 
peculiar way, with its wings half-spread and 
its feathers puffed out. Almost immediately 
there came a strange, gurgling series of notes, 
liquid and sweet, that seemed to express utter 
rapture. Then the bird dropped, with a back- 
ward motion, from the spray, and began to 
fall slowly and somewhat spirally down through 
the bloom-covered boughs. Its progress was 
quite like that of a bird wounded to death by a 
shot, clinging here and there to a twig, quiver- 
ing and weakly striking with its wings as it fell, 
but all the time it was pouring forth the most 
exquisite gushes and trills of song, not at all 
like its usual medley of improvised imitations 
