BY-WAYS 
AND 
deel ee NE Oy FS 
IN THE HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING- 
BIRD. 
THE mocking-bird has been called the 
American nightingale, with a view, no doubt, 
to inflicting a compliment involving the opera- 
tion, known to us all, of damning with faint 
praise. The nightingale presumably is not 
the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds 
immemorial title to preéminence amongst sing- 
ing-birds. The story of Philomela, however, 
as first told, was not an especially pleasing 
one, and the poets made no great use of it. 
Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far 
as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostro- 
phe to the nightingale comparable to Sappho’s 
fragment Zo the Rose; still the bird has a 
prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and 
upheld by the master romancers of the world. 
To compare the song of any other bird with 
that of the nightingale is like instituting a 
comparison between some poet of to-day and 
Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the 
would-be rival is concerned. The world has 
long ago made up its mind, and when the 
world once does that there is an end, a cul de 
