1 86 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



minutes the bird began fluting his little human 

 roundelay for our benefit. My host whistled and 

 hummed it after him, then took me to his drawing- 

 room and touched it off on his piano, and finally when 

 I told him that after all it would perhaps escape my 

 memory he noted it down for me, and here it is : 



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It is not a rare thing to hear phrases in the black- 

 bird's singing which are like human music and speech 

 and may be taken down in our musical notation. I 

 will give a quotation here on this subject from one of 

 C. A. Johns' pleasant but forgotten little books — 

 Home Walks and Holiday Rambles (1863). 



" A blackbird had stationed himself on the top of a 

 tree hard by, and seemed resolved to sing on until 

 fine weather returned. The burden of his song was 

 the following passage, which was repeated so often 

 that if one could tire of natural music I should have 

 been tired then : 



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" All the other strains were unmetrical, and there 

 seemed to be in them no melodious arrangement of 

 notes ; so that the general effect was nearly what could 

 be produced by a person talking in his natural tone of 

 voice, and repeatedly introducing a snatch of an old 



