120 NORTH CAROLINA 



countryside was alive with thera, till I felt 

 as if I had never seen grosbeaks before. 

 Their warbling was incessant ; so incessant, 

 and at the same time so exceedingly smooth 

 and sweet, — " mellifluous " is precisely the 

 word, — that I welcomed it almost as a re- 

 lief when the greater j^art of the chorus 

 moved on. After such a surfeit of honeyed 

 fluency, I was prepared better than ever to 

 appreciate certain of our humbler musicians, 

 — with a touch of roughness in the voice and 

 something of brokenness in the tune ; birds, 

 for instance, like the black-throated green 

 warbler, the yellow-throated vireo, and the 

 scarlet tanager. But if I was glad the 

 crowd had gone, I was glad also that a 

 goodly sprinkling of the birds had remained ; 

 so that there was never a day when I did not 

 see and hear them. The rose-breast is a 

 lovely singer. In my criticism of him I am 

 to be understood as meaning no more than 

 this : that he, like every other artist, has the 

 defects of his good qualities. Smoothness 

 is a virtue in music as in writing ; but it is 

 not the only virtue, nor the one that wears 

 longest. 



After the grosbeaks, whose great abun- 



