repeat that little phrase of yours about 

 amabiles vatiim choros, if you please. 

 Amabiles, indeed! 



But, Horace, I am done with you ; for 

 a purple gallinule has come out of the wet 

 grass yonder and is standing in all its 

 beauty on a pad of spatter-dock floating 

 and swaying against the creek's low and 

 muddy bank. Now there is the body of 

 symmetry for art to copy, there the color 

 to haunt the poet's imagination. How 

 perfectly the royal tints shade into one 

 another! A shy, dainty, graceful little 

 thing, moving lightly with sea-blue flick- 

 erings and half-liftings of wings and tail, 

 it somehow suspects the near presence of 

 danger, yet dares to go farther and farther, 

 with many quick starts and keen glances, 

 its agitation intensifying both its brilliance 

 of plumage and the expression of its atti- 

 tudes. Nature never produced a more 

 charming bit of grace, color, life. Keats 

 wrote an '* Ode to a Nightingale," and 

 Shelley one " To a Skylark " ; I wonder 

 how much I could get for an *' Ode to a 

 Purple Gallinule"? 



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