ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS. 125 



influenced in his opinion of them by the fact that 

 our common sandpiper appeared to be a silent bird, 

 whereas its British cousin, the sandpiper of the lakes 

 and streams of the Scottish Highlands, is very loqua- 

 cious, and the " male bird has a continuous and most 

 lively song." Either the Duke must have seen our 

 bird in one of its silent and meditative moods, or else 

 in the wilds of Canada, where his Grace speaks of 

 having seen it, the sandpiper is a more taciturn bird 

 than it is in the States. True, its call-notes are not 

 incessant, and it is not properly a song-bird any more 

 than the British species is, but it has a very pretty 

 and pleasing note as it flits up and down our sum- 

 mer streams, or runs along on their gray, pebbly, 

 and bowlder-strewn shallows. I often hear its call- 

 ing and piping at night during its spring migratings. 

 Indeed, we have no silent bird that I am aware of, 

 though our pretty cedar-bird has, perhaps, the least 

 voice of any. A lady writes me that she has heard 

 the humming-bird sing, and says she is not to be 

 put down, even if I were to prove by the anatomy 

 of the bird's vocal organs that a song was impossible 

 to it. 



Argyll says that though he was in the woods and 

 fields of Canada and of the States in the richest mo- 

 ment of the spring, he heard little of that burst of 

 song which in England comes from the blackcap, and 

 the garden warbler, and the white-throat, and the 

 reed warbler, and the common wren, and (locally) 

 from the nightingale. There is no lack of a burst of 



