Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 25 



flock of cedar Waxwings, among the blossoms of 

 the wild crab apple trees, along the drive. They 

 were a revelation of beauty and a rebuke to the 

 unwashed and unkempt of the human family. In 

 a wide sense, they were of the earth, but not of 

 the dirt. He could not describe, he could only 

 feel. Later on, he might have said, "Architecture 

 has been called 'frozen poetry/ and my first 

 glimpse of them made me dimly understand that 

 I was looking upon incarnate poetry They were 

 the living, breathing spirit of harmony that is 

 back of all musical expression." That they were 

 feeding upon blossoms gave him a feeling that 

 they were scarcely of the earth, surely not earthy 

 of the earth. Other birds were covered with 

 feathers; these were robed, uniformed, appareled 

 by a master hand. Compared to them, many 

 other birds were frumps, and even a gorgeous 

 red and green parrot, little more than an Irish 

 woman out for a holiday. So far as clothes went 

 with them, every day was Sunday, for they wore 

 their best three hundred and sixty-five days in the 

 year, and like the smile of Optimism, they were as 

 near perpetual as anything can be in a world of 

 change. Being convinced that they were going to 

 remain, he did not, but made a sneak for the 

 kitchen and scrubbed his hands and face, combed 

 his hair, brushed his clothes, got a straw hat that 

 did not have a hole in the crown, and having done 



