MOCKINGBIRD. 49 
and not least their trustfulness, make them the most beloved and most cherished birds 
of our country. Our Southern people love this famous bird with the same affection as 
the people of New England love the Robin. In most gardens and orange groves it is 
truly at home, and every one is delighted by its exceeding happiness. A singing Mock- 
ingbird perched at early morn in the top of a-flowering Magnolia grandiflora is a picture 
never to be forgotten. The ringing notes sounding through the air, the thousands of 
starry white blossoms among the beautiful evergreen foliage, exhaling a delicious fra- 
grance, powerfully affect the observer. The grand gardens of the South would be barren 
and dead without this songster. It lends them life; it is their poetical soul. 
The following example shows how tame and affectionate the Mockingbird may 
become under kind treatment: In Texas I kept in a cage a very tame female which I 
had reared from the nest. The next spring I set her free, but she had no desire to 
depart. She would often fly into my room, alight on my desk where I was writing, 
and was very fond of staying with the children in the garden. Several times I took her 
away a considerable distance, but she returned at once. When I worked among my 
flowers in the garden, she hopped about on the ground looking for insects. Every 
evening she returned to her cage. This lasted some weeks, when a male appeared upon 
the scene. Now she was often absent Jonger at a time, but always returned when I 
called, and perched on my shoulder or on my arm, and took worms and beetles from 
my hand in the most affectionate manner. She still returned to her cage in the evening. 
One day early in the morning I observed her carrying blades of grass into a corner of a 
rail fence, and here I found the almost completed nest. As soon as the first egg was 
deposited, she failed to return to the cage at night. She was so tame while on the nest 
that she could be stroked without stirrmg. Unhappily my delight in the bird was 
destined to come to an end. One morning, shortly after the young were hatched, I 
found the nest destroyed, and my tame bird had disappeared. A chicken-snake had 
probably swallowed both the parent bird and its young. The forsaken male fluttered 
about uttering sad and disconsolate notes. 
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” tells 
us in her little book “Palmetto Leaves,” that the wild Mockingbirds, too, may become 
quite tame. A young man from Massachusetts, driven to seek health in a milder 
climate, had bought a piece of land in the neighborhood of St. Augustine, Florida. 
“We visited this place, and found him and his mother in a neat little cottage, adorned 
only with grasses and flowers picked in the wild woods, and living in perfect familiar- 
ity with the birds, which they have learned to call in from the neighboring forests. 
It. has become one of the fashionable amusements in the season for strangers do drive 
out to this cottage and see the birds fed. At a call from the inmates of the cottage, 
the Blue Jays and Mockingbirds will come in flocks, settle on their shoulders, eat out 
of their hands, or out of the hands of any one who chooses to hold food for them. 
When we drove out, however, the birds were mostly dispersed about their domestic 
affairs; this being the nesting season. Moreover the ample supply of insects and fresh 
wild berries in the woods makes them less anxious for such dry food as contented them 
in winter. Only one pet Mockingbird had established himself in a neighboring tree, 
and came at their call.’ 
ve 
