A Christmas Carol. 183 



crimson breast. Sometimes the flocks contain a few 

 young males, but until the first mating season has 

 tipped their breast feathers with deep crimson they 

 are almost indistinguishable from their sober colored 

 companions. 



This crimson breast shield, by the way, is the family 

 mark or coat of arms of the grosbeaks, just as the scar- 

 let crest marks all the woodpeckers. And if you ask a 

 Micmac, deep in the woods, how the grosbeak got his 

 shield, he may tell you a story that will interest you 

 as did the legend of Hiawatha and the woodpecker 

 in your childhood days. 



If the old male, with his proud crimson, be rare with 

 us, his beautiful song is still more so. Only in the 

 deep forests, by the lonely rivers of the far north, where 

 no human ear ever hears, docs he greet the sunrise 

 from the top of some lofty spruce. There also he pours 

 into the ears of his sober little gray wife the sweetest 

 love song of the birds. It is a flood of soft warbling 

 notes, tinkling like a brook deep under the ice, tum- 

 bling over each other in a quiet ecstasy of harmony ; 

 mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much 

 softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to 

 whom he sang. Those who know the music of the 

 rose-breasted grosbeak (not his robin-like song of 

 spring, but the exquisitely soft warble to his brood- 

 ing mate) may multiply its sweetness indefinitely, 



