rainin'." A showery April day had sufficed to complete the 
For a long while, too, the shrieks and hootings of sundry owls 
continually suggested an unnameable likeness to other sounds 
in nature, but save that impossible original in the north window 
casements, none other presented itself to mind. 
Then in hypothetic despair I bethought me of an empty 
porter bottle which once hoo-hooed and shrieked, to the wind 
responsive, from a nigh fence panel, till a wrathful storm 
With twofold thank ■ that the bottle was empty, I now am 
wont to picture how, ages ago, the mute, inarticulate Scops 
sat taking music lessons in his porter-bottle house, and how in 
piny solitudes remote, great Bubo tuned those bass-viol mon- 
otones of his in full accord. 
The mourning Dove is typical of a family whose voices are 
in symphonious keeping, with the sighing cedars and moaning 
pines of their choice. The same correspondence is noticeable 
in species which, like the Grouse, Vulture, Swan and other 
aquatic kinds are mute or nearly silent. 
In contrast with the silent Vulture, content with silent vic- 
tims, the nearly related Eagles and Hawks are a screaming, noisy 
set of birds which seem to have adopted for their own a quin- 
tessence of the dying utterances of their victims merely because 
•of carnal policy and from no delight in language in itself con- 
sidered. 
However, the further consideration of this, more properly 
belongs to the last division of mimics, i.e. those which inten- 
tionally imitate the sounds produced by their conteraporarier. 
It were best, ere passing on, to allude to a few others of 
those birds whose notes resemble the sounds produced by the 
action of wind. The Broad-wing Hawk's love-notes are like 
the sound of high-whistling winds or the shrill creaking of 
interfering tree limbs, or maybe imagined by another to be 
the exaggerated shrieking of a stricken hare or field-mouse. 
Possibly, yes, probably, all of these may have had combined 
influence. 
