WHITE-BANDED MOCKING-BIRD 15 
its melody was greatly enhanced when I could at the 
same time see the bird, so carried away with rapture 
does he appear while singing, so many and so beau- 
tiful are the gestures and motions with which his 
notes are accompanied. He passes incessantly from 
bush to bush, scarcely alighting on their summits, 
and at times dropping down beneath the foliage; 
then, at intervals, soaring to a height of a hundred 
feet above the thicket, with a flight slow as that of a 
Heron, or mounting suddenly upwards with a wild, 
hurried, zigzag motion; then slowly circling down- 
wards, to sit with tail outspread and the broad 
glistening white wings expanded, or languidly waved 
up and down like the wings of some great butterfly 
—an object beautiful to see. 
When I first heard this bird sing I felt convinced 
that no other feathered songster on the globe could 
compare with it; for besides the faculty of repro- 
ducing the songs of other species, which it possesses 
in common with the Virginian Mocking-bird, it has 
a song of its own, which I believed matchless; and 
in this belief I was confirmed when, shortly after 
hearing it, I visited England, and found of how much 
less account than this Patagonian bird, which no poet 
has ever praised, were the sweetest of the famed 
melodists of the Old World. 
