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bound wayfarers, he comes. The thickets 

 where he hid and chattered welcome him 

 again, and again the cat-bird builds his nest 

 in the bushes and watches his fledglings 

 through the long, warm days, while grass 

 grows underfoot and the sun shines overhead. 

 And when night comes, when the west is a 

 full-blown rose and the valleys and slopes 

 take on nunlike folds of twilight and deeper 

 darkness, comes the cat-bird's matin time. 

 His most beautiful song is of the night. And 

 if ever a bird had a soul, some subtle trace 

 of sensibility to stars and moon, and the tide 

 of summer languor, surely this bird has. 



Where we used to fish at a little lake 

 locked in by the hills, there was a cat-bird that 

 made his nest in a thicket in the orchard. 

 Sometimes he would come at midnight to a 

 cedar-tree close to the house and sing. We 

 never saw him come to the tree, but we heard 

 him sing several times in the moonlight. At 

 about twelve o'clock he would begin, and the 

 song would continue for possibly twenty min- 

 utes, with some short intervals of silence. 

 He never came except on clear nights, and 

 the cedar where he sang stood dense and 

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