THE ROBIN'S SONG. 



A SPRING TIME SATIRE. 



It was spring. I made the assertion 

 with all boldness. Socrates could scarce- 

 ly have been surer of his "sign" than 

 was I of mine. When had it failed? It 

 had survived a probation of ten years. 

 What other index of the seasons has in 

 your experience surpassed that record? 

 I felt that there was reason for conceit. 

 For spring, I had early learned, was 

 the veriest iconoclast, a veritable (if I 

 might invent and add and be forgiven by 

 the traditionally gentle reader for hurl- 

 ing at him the rhetorical somersault) 

 semeioclast or— to translate into unvar- 

 nished vernacular — a "sign smasher." 



What signified the calendar? The ver- 

 nal equinox was an arbitrary date. It 

 might mark high winter. To fall asleep 

 •on the identically corresponding winter 

 night of each successive year and next 

 awaken to the spring was pretty fancy 

 but purest fiction. The sign failed. At 

 best it was a mathematical convenience. 



Then, too, there were the scarcely less 

 conventional robin and blue-bird, the 

 symbols highest perhaps in boyhood's es- 

 teem and possibly in general popularity. 

 Their mere presence, however, soon came 

 to count for little enough as a season in- 

 dicator. As far north as latitude 38° 35" 

 I had found the red-breast for twelve 

 successive months. In the mild winters 

 he haunted the timber, strangely silent, 

 but — with equal strangeness to some per- 

 haps — in troops. The blue-bird, famed 

 but fabled "color bearer of the spring," 

 had become a better harbinger of cold. 

 Only in the autumn was he notable by 

 numbers and boldness and his sweetly 

 querulous farewell, lisped from fence or 

 roof or from high in air some frosty 

 morning on his passage south, was a 

 characteristic note of the waning vear. So 

 failed again the signs, alike the most fa- 

 miliar and by associations — alas ! — the 

 dearest. 



Had I been a girl I might have dated 

 the season sentimental by the Johnny- 

 jump-ups but were not Johnny's chief 

 virtues those of his name, ubiquitousness 

 and a certain virility? The feminine 

 flowers were earlier, more delicatelv 



beautiful. Johnny, too, like the red- 

 breast and the blue-back, was a loiterer. 

 Within tlie limits of the robin's twelve 

 months' stay specified above I had 

 glimpsed his saucy, purple face on sunny 

 uplands after mid-November frosts and 

 hoped to surprise him afield some Christ- 

 mas day. 



Unnamed as yet and worthy only as 

 the child's first favorite was that bane of 

 lawns, the dandelion. But, aside from 

 graver faults, it was even more nearly 

 perennial than either violet or robin. In- 

 deed its gold was only gold in winter 

 months when it changed not, by its usual 

 perverse alchemy, to seed-silver. 



Plainly then we must have done with 

 popular indications. Only expert testi- 

 mony could be accepted. What said the 

 aesthetes? Their names must be Blank 

 but they were also Legion and they all 

 had it all worked out for us. Nature's 

 clock is wound and working ; the cuckoo 

 pops out and creaks his wooden song ; 

 this bird appears ; that flower blooms ; 

 and spring is on ! By dictum, for ex- 

 ample, the first feathered prophet of ver- 

 nal days is the purple grackle; their first 

 floral precursor, the hepatica. This is 

 certainly definite enough. Would that it 

 were as definitely certain. But the iris- 

 coated trooper of the swamps ranges over 

 frozen wastes. From the reedy meadows 

 of December drifted deep with snow he 

 may at times be flushed. Prophet he is 

 but too remotely so. Nor does the vir- 

 gin pink of the hepatica smile on us of 

 the sparsely timbered west. A commoner 

 she is not, but a high-born lady, a recluse. 

 Might they not both better stand as types 

 of sign failures, the former as the sign 

 too early, the latter as the sign too lit- 

 tle familiar? To these lower terms at 

 any rate may be reduced nearly all the 

 symbols of the season. That so-called 

 first blossom of the spring, the skunk- 

 cabbage, uncanny monk that he is, may 

 lift his mottled cowl in November or Jan- 

 uary as well as March. Besides, his hab- 

 itat, all his associations are — to phrase it 

 lightly — unsesthetic. Buds are swelling 

 the winter through and have been formed 



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