BOYHOOD AND BIRDS. 63 



alchemyzed with splendor, that they knew not their own 

 song. 



This curious phenomenon I have witnessed many times 

 since. Even in the morning choir, when every little throat 

 seems strained in emulation, if the mocking bird breathes 

 forth in one of its mad, bewildered and bewildering extrav- 

 aganzas, the other birds pause almost invariably and remain 

 silent until his song is done. This, I assure you, is no fig- 

 ment of the imagination or illusion of an excited fancy ; it 

 is just as substantial a fact as any other one in Natural 

 History. Whether the other birds stop from envy, as has 

 been said, or from awe, cannot be so well ascertained, but I 

 believe it is from the sentiment of awe, for as I certainly have 

 felt it myself in listening to the mocking bird, I do not know 

 why these inferior creatures should not also. 



Five or six pairs of them made their appearance in the 

 neighborhood of the town this spring, and though they un- 

 doubtedly nested and bred close at hand, all attempts to find 

 their nests proved unavailing to the enterprising youngsters 

 of the town, who had turned mocking-bird-mad all of a sud- 

 den because they had heard somebody say, modestly, that 

 they were " very fine singing birds indeed 1" because Jim 

 Snooks or Snobs I forget which had said " he had hearn 

 of their sellin' for thirty dollars! !! in New Orleans!" Poor 

 child of song ! It is well for thee that thine arch mother- wit 

 stood thee in stead, or else thy glorious progeny might have 

 been ignominiously consigned along with the geese, gigs and 

 chickens of some flat-boat trader's cargo to be sold to the 

 highest bidder in some northern mart. Sentimental young 

 ladies, too, became interested, because some one had heard some- 

 body say that she had heard the foreign-looking young gen- 

 tleman, who wore a moustache and claimed to be an artist, 

 (vulgate Fiddler !) that "the creature sang divinely by moon- 

 light !" though it is insinuated to this day, that he meant the 

 tree-frog ! So all the ragged little hopefuls, whom these young 

 feminine romanticists delighted in calling their "naughty 



