BIRD-SONGS 
next time, a few years later, I heard the song in 
company with a friend, Dr. Clara Barrus. Let 
me give the woman’s impression of the song as she 
afterward wrote it up for a popular journal. 
“The sunset light was flooding all this May love- 
liness of field and farm and distant wood; song 
sparrows were blithely pouring out happiness by the 
throatful; peepers were piping and toads trilling, and 
we thought it no hardship to wait in such a place till 
the dusk should gather, and the wary woodcock an- 
nounce his presence. But hark! while yet ’tis light, 
only a few rods distant, I hear that welcome ‘seap... 
seap,’ and lo! a chipper and a chirr, and past us he 
flies, —a direct, slanting upward flight, somewhat 
labored, —his bill showing long against the reddened 
sky. ‘He has something in his mouth,’ I start to say, 
when I bethink me what a long bill he has. Around, 
above us he flies in wide, ambitious circles, the while 
we are enveloped, as it were, in that hurried chip- 
pering sound —fine, elusive, now near, now distant. 
How rapid is the flight! Now it sounds faster and 
faster, ‘like a whiplash flashed through the air,’ said 
my friend; up, up he soars, till he becomes lost to 
sight at the instant that his song ends in that last 
mad ecstasy that just precedes his alighting.” 
The meadowlark sings in a level flight, half hov- 
ering in the air, giving voice to a rapid medley of 
lark-like notes. The goldfinch also sings in a level 
flight, beating the air slowly with its wings broadly 
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