12 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 



bird, and before 1 could get my attention 

 rightly fixed upon the song it had ended. 



Something of the rare aroma, so to speak, 

 of the curiously modulated trills and quavers 

 lingered in my memory, however, along with 

 Uncle Jo's graphic description of the bird's 

 actions. After that I was on the lookout for 

 an opportunity to verify the negro's state- 

 ments. 



I have not exactly kept the date of my first 

 actual observation, but it was late in April, or 

 very early in May; for the crab-apple trees, 

 growing wild in the Georgian hills, were in 

 full bloom, and spring had come to stay. I 

 had been out since the first sparkle of day- 

 light. The sun was rising, and I had been 

 standing quite still for some minutes, watch- 

 ing a mocking-bird that was singing in a 

 snatchy, broken way, as it fluttered about in a 

 thick-topped crab-apple tree thirty yards dis- 

 tant from me. Suddenly the bird, a fine speci- 

 men, leaped like a flash to the highest spray 

 of the tree and began to flutter in a trembling, 

 peculiar way, with its wings haltspread and 

 its feathers puffed out. Almost immediately 

 there came a strange, gurgling series of notes, 

 liquid and sweet, that seemed to express utter 

 rapture. Then the bird dropped, with a back- 

 ward motion, from the spray, and began to 

 fall slowly and somewhat spirally down through 

 the bloom-covered boughs. Its progress was 

 quite like that of a bird wounded to death by a 

 shot, clinging here and there to a twig, quiver- 

 ing and weakly striking with its wings as it fell, 

 but all the time it was pouring forth the most 

 exquisite gushes and trills of song, not at all 

 like its usual medley of improvised imitations 



