Chickadee Ways 53 



song back and forth in the woods like a silvery pendulum. 

 Not soon shall I forget a winter day on which I listened 

 with delight to such an antiphonal duet. I was standing 

 in a road that wound along the foot of a steep, wooded 

 bluff, and the two minstrels were in the woods above me, 

 one of them singing very high in the scale, the other 

 responding in the same tune, but almost, if not quite, an 

 octave lower. At first they were about twenty rods 

 apart, but as they swung back and forth, they gradually 

 approached each other until the distance between them 

 was only a few feet. The music seemed like a slender 

 thread of silver which was being wound up at both ends, 

 gradually drawing the little fluters' together. Sometimes 

 one of them would miss one note of his dissyllabic song, 

 and at times the refrains were repeated in a leisurely way, 

 at times in quick succession; but the performers never 

 sang simultaneously, each waiting until his fellow minstrel 

 had given his reply. The pleasing duet lasted for many 

 minutes; indeed, it was kept up long after I left the 

 immediate neighborhood, for when I had gone quite a 

 distance the sweet cadenzas still fell rhythmically on my 

 ear. To my mind the two-part aria seemed like a 

 voluntary performance, and I cannot doubt that it was. 

 There was too much of an air of purpose about it to per- 

 mit of the thought that it was a mere accident or coinci- 

 dence ; but whether it was a musical contest between rival 

 vocalists, or the love song of a tomtit and his mate, I 

 could not determine. 



Cunning in other ways, it would be strange if the torn- 



