Minnesota STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 95 
Now that the advancing sun has awakened the teeming earth to bring forth 
its varied productions and develop its hybernated insect lite, the Thrushes and 
_ Warblers come, like a great living wave, ours only a part of it, which extends 
from ocean to ocean, that rolls northward from about the first to the fitteenth of 
of May, varying with the seasons. Let us not imagine that this is visible to the 
closed eye. Our eyes, our ears and our hearts must be open if we are to witness 
it. Nobody can see it through the dust and cobwebs of a life absorbed by mate- 
nal gains. Like the approach of morning to the eye, eolian music to the ear, 
and the dawnings of love in the heart, this sweetest, grandest revelation of 
spring steals upon and envelops us in its extatic wonders, or leaves us to oblivi- 
ous slumbers upon the lazy couch of indifference, while it moves onward hke an 
etherial tide. Nothing could more perfectly illustrate the appropriateness of 
these figures of speech we have employed than the arrival of the first thrush, 
called the Hermit. Some little time in advance of all the others, he comes the 
“‘avaunt courier’’ of the approaching hosts. ‘‘ The dark, solitary cane and 
myrtle swamps of the Southern States are the favorite haunts of this silent and 
recluse species, and the deeper and more gloomy these are, the more certain are 
we to meet with this bird. So in migration, we must look for it in the shadows 
of dense forests, where the moist leaves and mosses have carpeted the sylvan 
halls of silence. Butthe Ruby crowned and Golden crested Kinglets, less cautious 
and in considerable numbers along the borders of streams, begin to break the 
silence; and then the little House Wren, the most thoroughly in earnest of all 
the song world, and just ready to burst if he doesn’t open his mouth, jumps upon 
the stage like a little ‘‘prima donna,”’ and fills the air with a solo that would 
wake the whole choir if only here. The concert thus preluded, is steadily 
swelled by the addition of another, and another warbler, until some morning 
early in May, a breath of coming summer suddenly opens the buds of many 
waiting blossoms, rendering the air fragrant with familiar aromas, the Mocking 
Thrush, or Brown Thrasher, as he is infelicitously ‘called, peerless amongst 
American songsters, mounts the topmost branch of some isolated tree and pours 
forth a volume of melody, which, for fullness, variety and sweetness, is utterly 
incomparable, and challenges all attempt at description. The entire woods have 
now become vocal with song. The warblers in endless varieties of decoration 
more delicate and beautiful than art can imitate or pen describe, representing 
some thirty species, some of which are very numerous, and the Sparrows, some 
of which are scarcely inferior in song or plumage tw the warblers, have registered 
themselves ‘present’ in full by their songs or their busy appropriation of insects 
and seeds not already consumed by the winter species. 
The gorgeous Baltimore bird, with notes as soft as a flute, the Orchard Oriole, 
Robin Redbreast, Grosbeak, a charming, soft, rich singer, the Cat Bird, than 
whom there is only one superior melodist, and that his regal relative the Mocking 
Thrush before mentioned, the Indigo Lird and Meadow Lark have each joined 
the grand chorus. 
We listen, wrapt in astonishment and admiration. This wondrous mystery 
of the Divine goodness,. The Bird! holds us spellbound. From the beginning to 
the end of its weird and wonderful life its history is one of surpassing charms 
and indiseribable fascinations. 
The egg, its elliptical marble palace of embryotic infancy, the most compre- 
hensible and symmetrical of forms, hke a mirror hung athwart the portals of 
nature, flashes into our thought the startling problem of life. A charming pen 
calls it ‘“‘a complete minature world, a perfect harmony from which nothing can 
