26 
BIEDS IN A VILLAGE. 
most species, the mocking-birds included, in the 
extraordinary rapidity with which it is enunciated ; 
once the song begins it goes on swiftly to the 
finish, harsh and melodious notes seeming to over- 
lap and mingle, the sounds forming, to speak in 
metaphor, a close intricate pattern of strongly con- 
trasted colours. Now the song invariably begins 
with the harsh notes — the sounds which, at other 
times, express alarm and other more or less painful 
emotions — and it strikes me as a probable explana- 
tion that when the bird in the singing season has 
been startled into uttering these harsh and grating 
sounds, as when a stone is flung into the rushes, 
he is incapable of uttering them only, but the 
singing notes they suggest, and which he is in the 
habit of uttering, follow automatically. 
The spot where I observed this wee feathered 
fantasy, the tantalizing sprite of the rushes, and 
where I very soon ceased to see, hear, and think 
about him, calls for a fuller description. On one 
side the wooded hill slooped downward to the 
stream; on the other side spread the meadows 
where the rooks came every day to feed, or to sit 
and stand about motionless, looking like birds cut 
out of jet and scattered over half an acre of the 
grassy level ground. Stout old pollard-willows 
grow here and there along the banks and were 
pleasant to see, this being the one man-mutilated 
