106 TANGLES OF BIRD-SONG. 



It must not be thought that this concert lacked 

 variety. Some of the songs were loud and joyous, 

 others soft and plaintive. One minstrel sang a 

 song of triumph, another a love song, another a 

 dirge, and still another a lullaby. Besides, there 

 was every variet}^ of inflection, of trill and quaver, 

 of clear note and broken spray, of sharp staccato 

 and blended legato. Only two other birds took part 

 in the concert ; the black-throated bunting, which 

 rang in his harsh notes like a trombone accompani- 

 ment, and the warbling vireo, whose almost human 

 tones ran sweetly through it all. A morning like 

 this opens a man's senses to the beauties of nature, 

 and makes him a better man ever after. 



No songster with which I am acquainted has a 

 larger repertoire of notes than the brown thrush. 

 While he seems to sing with diffidence on the out- 

 skirts of the city, though he may rear a brood in 

 the hawthorns near by, yet in his more sequestered 

 haunts he is lavish of his music, making the wood- 

 lands echo from morning till night. One May day 

 I took a long ramble along the cliffy banks of a 

 river in Central Ohio, and at last reached a grassy 

 slope, where hawthorns grew here and there in 

 clumps. The broad stretch of lowland below was 

 green with fresh grass and sparsely timbered with 



