12 ESTHETIC RELATIONS OF BIRDS. 



share its emotions as you learn the significance of its 

 notes. No one can listen to the song of the Mockingbird 

 without being in some way affected ; but in how many 

 hearts does the tink of the night-flying Bobolink find a 

 response? I never hear it without wishing the brave 

 little traveler Godspeed on his long journey. 



As time passes you will find that the songs of birds 

 bring a constantly increasing pleasure. This is the result 

 of association. The places and people that make our 

 world are ever changing ; the present slips from us with 

 growing rapidity, but the birds are ever with us. 



The Kobin singing so cheerily outside my window 

 sings not for himself alone, but for hundreds of Robins I 

 have known at other times and places. His song recalls 

 a March evening, warm with the promise of spring ; May 

 mornings, when all the world seemed to ring with the 

 voices of birds ; June days, when cherries were ripening ; 

 the winter sunlit forests of Florida, and even the snow- 

 capped summit of glorious Popocatepetl. And so it is 

 with other birds. We may, it is true, have known them 

 for years, but they have not changed, and their familiar 

 notes and appearance encourage the pleasant self-delusion 

 that we too are the same. 



The slender saplings of earlier years now give wide- 

 spreading shade, the scrubby pasture lot has become a 

 dense woodland. Boyhood's friends are boys no longer, 

 and, worst of all, there has appeared another generation 

 of boys whose presence is discouraging proof that for us 

 youth has past. Then some May morning we hear the 

 Wood Thrush sing. Has he, too, changed ? Not one 

 note, and as his silvery voice rings through the woods 

 we are young again. No fountain of youth could be 

 more potent. A hundred incidents of the long ago be- 

 come as real as those of yesterday. And here we have 

 the secret of youth in age which every venerable natural- 



