BOYHOOD ANl) BIRDS. 
63 
alchemy zed with splendor, that they knew not their own 
song. 
This curious phenomenon I have witnessed many times 
since. Even in the morning choir, when every little throat 
seems strained in emulation, if the mocking bird breathes 
forth in one of its mad, bewildered and bewildering extrav- 
aganzas, the other birds pause almost invariably and remain 
silent until his song is done. This, I assure you, is no fig- 
ment of the imagination or illusion of an excited fancy ; it 
is just as substantial a fact as any other one in Natural 
History. Whether the other birds stop from envy, as has 
been said, or from awe, cannot be so well ascertained, but I 
believe it is from the sentiment of awe, for as I certainly have 
felt it myself in listening to the mocking bird, I do not know 
why these inferior creatures should not also. 
Five or six pairs of them made their appearance in the 
neighborhood of the town this spring, and though they un- 
doubtedly nested and bred close at hand, all attempts to find 
their nests proved unavailing to the enterprising youngsters 
of the town, who had turned mocking-bird-mad all of a sud- 
den — because they had heard somebody say, modestly, that 
they were " very fine singing birds indeed !" — because Jim 
Snooks — ^or Snobs — I forget which — had said " he had hearn 
of their sellin' for thirty dollars! ! ! in New Orleans!" Poor 
child of song ! It is well for thee that thine arch mother- wdt 
stood thee in stead, or else thy glorious progeny might have 
been ignominiously consigned along with the geese, gigs and 
chickens of some flat-boat trader's cargo — to be sold to the 
highest bidder in some northern mart. Sentimental young 
ladies, too, became in terested^ because some one had heard some- 
body say that she had heard the foreign-looking young gen 
tleman, who wore a moustache and claimed to be an artist, 
{vulgate — Fiddler !) that "the creature sang divinely by moon- 
light !" — though it is insinuated to this day, that he meant the 
tree-frog ! So all the ragged little hopefuls, whom these young 
feminine romanticists delighted in calling their "naughty 
