182 WOOD NOTES WILD. 
NIGHTINGALE AND HIs Rivats. — Contin. 
For choice passages on the song of the nightingale see F. A. Knight’s 
delightful little volume, “Idylls of the Field,” pp. 93-94. 
See also Hamerton, P. G.: Chapters on Animals, chap. 13.— Dom. 
Habits of Birds. (Lib. Enter. Knowl., pp. 284-289.) — Lescuyer, F. ; 
Langage et Chant des Oiseaux (Paris, 1878), pp. 67-71. — Litt. Liv. Age, 
vol. xxv., 1850, pp. 273-278; vol. xlii., 1854, pp. 612-614. — Plinius Se- 
cundus, C.: Natural History, bk. x. chap. xliii.— Die Vogelsprache. 
( Gartenlaube, 1866, pp. 705-707.) 
“But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such 
sweet, loud music out of her little instrumental throat that it might make 
mankind to think that miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, 
when the very laborer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have often, the 
clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling 
and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, 
Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in Heaven, when thou 
affordest bad men such music on earth!” — Walton, I.: The Complete 
Angler (London, 1875), p. cxiv. 
See also Aristophanes: The Birds. (In his Comedies, vol. i. pp. 
301-386.) 
Imported Songsters. 
Thanks to the enterprise of the West, we need no longer 
go to the books sent us from beyond the sea to hear the 
old-world songsters, the birds immortalized by Keats and 
Shelley, the birds sung and descanted upon by hundreds 
of others less famous. Mr. C. F. Pfluger, Secretary of the 
Society for the Introduction of Useful Singing-birds into 
Oregon, writes under date of Dec. 22, 1890, as follows: 
“In the month of May, 1889, the society imported from 
Clausthal, in Germany, under a contract with a German bird- 
dealer, the following birds in pairs of males and females, viz. : 
Ten pairs of black-headed nightingales, eight pairs of gray 
song thrushes, fifteen pairs of black song thrushes, twenty-two 
pairs of skylarks, four pairs of singing quail, twenty pairs of 
black starlings, nineteen bullfinches, three of which were females 
and sixteen males; the rest of the females had died on the way ; 
