72 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
Not a few of our common birds have been self-christened, and 
are at one in the popular as well as the scientific vocabularies. 
The pheebe, chickadee, chebec, chewink, towhee, pewee, and Bob 
White need no printed plate or page for their identification. Nor 
does the whippoorwill, known throughout the continent by its 
weird nocturnal cry. Indeed, how little else than this uncanny 
“wandering voice” of the bird is known to the popular mind! 
How many a rural octogenarian will you find who has ever seen 
the strange, wide-eyed, mottled bird that from earliest memory, 
(perhaps, has made its nightly haunt upon his well-sweep or even 
the domestic door-sill ? 
The penny trumpet of the nuthatch’ occasionally takes up its 
tiny part in the orchestral score from the maple above the house. 
“ Quah, quah,” says Thoreau; but the “Yank, yank” of Burroughs 
is certainly more truly caught, not only in its phonetic quality, but 
in its suggestiveness of that prying, tugging bill among the scales 
and crevices of bark. 
I am not aware that poet or ornithological stenographer has 
yet transcribed the vocal performance of the wren—those “ five 
notes to wanst,” as the Hibernian listener once observed (and pat 
it was in truth)—being certainly very discouraging to such an 
undertaking. And there is another of our bird songs scarcely 
less disheartening in its intricacy. How have the bird historians 
and poets labored in its whirling rapids—cast their hooks and 
nets, as it were, to catch the bursting bubbles in its rippling 
wake! Listen! that pell-mell, gushing rhapsody from the mead- 
ow below—a sextet, with obligato and piccolo variations—all 
from a single throat. Can it be possible, indeed, that yonder 
sable minstrel swaying on the dock is alone responsible for all 
this Babel? Hark! a moment more and he will find his breath 
again. There! ‘Bob o’ 4xk o’ loo o' happy go lucky O lucky.” 
Such is often the introductory refrain, once or twice repeated, 
with a brief interval. But who shall follow the subsequent vocal 
revelations? Even though possible of analysis by the ear, would 
‘it not take six pens in simultaneous effort to chronicle? Who 
knows what unsuspected melody may not be submerged in that 
