BIED MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 141 



tiously among the bushes, pausing at intervals to 

 listen to some new note; or to hide myself and 

 sit or lie motionless in the middle of a thicket, 

 until the birds forgot or ceased to be troubled at 

 my presence. The common resident mocking-bird 

 was always present, each bird sitting motionless 

 on the topmost spray of his favorite thorn, at 

 intervals emitting a few notes, a phrase, then 

 listening to the others. 



But there was one bitter drop in my sweet cup. 

 It vexed my mind and made me almost unhappy 

 to think that travelers and naturalists from 

 Europe, whose works were known to me, were 

 either silent or else said very little (and that 

 mostly depreciatory) of the bird music that was 

 so much to me. Darwin's few words were espe- 

 cially remembered and rankled most in my mind, 

 because he was the greatest and had given a good 

 deal of attention to bird life in southern South 

 America. The highest praise that he gave to a 

 Patagonian songster was that it had "two or 

 three pleasant notes"; and of the Calandria mock- 

 ing-bird, one of the finest melodists in La Plata, 

 he wrote that it was nearly the only bird he had 

 seen in South America that regularly took its 

 stand for the purpose of singing; that it was re- 

 markable for possessing a song superior to that 

 of any other kind, and that its song resembled that 

 of the sedge warbler! 



Speaking of British species, I do not think it 

 could be rightly said that the song of the sedge 



