THE WOOD-PEWEE. 129 
“ Phebe! it calls and calls again ; 
And Ovid, could he but have heard, 
Had hung a legendary pain 
About the memory of the bird. 
“ Phebe! is all it has to say 
In plaintive cadence o’er and o’er, 
Like children who have lost their way, 
And know their names, but nothing more.” 
This poetical tribute is certainly very graceful, 
and would be true to life if the phonetic represen- 
tation were a little more accurate. Instead of 
fhebe, imagine the song to be Pe-e-w-e-e-e or Phe- 
é-w-e-e-é, and you will gain a clear idea of the min- 
strelsy of this songster of the wildwood. However, 
he frequently varies his tune,—to prevent its 
becoming monotonous, I opine. He sometimes 
closes his refrain with the falling inflection or cir- 
cumflex, and sometimes with the rising, as the mood 
prompts him. In the former case the first syllable 
receives the greater emphasis and is the more pro- 
longed, and in the latter this order is precisely 
reversed. When the last syllable is uttered with the 
rising circumflex, it is usually, if not always, cut off 
somewhat abruptly. Moreover, this minstrel often 
runs the two syllables of hissong together, — a pecu- 
liarity that I have represented in my notes, taken 
while listening to the song, in this way: /%e-e-e-o- 
o-w-e-e-e / ‘There is a characteristic swing about 
the melody that refuses to be caught in the mesh 
of letters and syllables. ; 
In some of the pewee’s vocal efforts he does not 
9 
