UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
and much softer-voiced. Besides, he is a bird of the 
streets and dooryards, very noticeable everywhere, 
and, so far as I can learn, has no tastes or habits that 
incur the enmity of the farmer or the fruit-grower. 
I pass within a few feet of him and his duller-colored 
mate walking about the smooth lawns, picking some 
minute insects from the ends of the grass-blades. 
This seems to be his chief occupation. Like all 
blackbirds, these are social and gregarious, and at 
times, when in flocks, their musical instincts are 
stimulated. I have heard a band of them in the later 
afternoon discourse a wild, pleasing music much 
superior to the crude, harsh cackle and split whistles 
of the related species with us. 
The birds here are abundant both in kinds and 
in numbers. The white-crowned sparrows are fa- 
miliar about the houses and the gardens, and they 
sing most sweetly, but the song is not quite equal to 
the song they sing along the Hudson for a brief day 
or two in May. Here they sing for weeks. 
The mockingbirds are as common as robins are 
at home —all about the Jawns and gardens and 
streets, flitting, flirting, attitudinizing, and singing 
— on the housetops, on the telegraph and telephone 
wires, on the curbstones, on the lawn. In the face 
of this bird’s great fame as a songster, I wonder why 
I am so indifferent to it. It pleases me less than 
do its cousins, the catbird and the brown thrasher. 
I detect little or no music — sweet tones — in it. It 
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