30 THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS. 
it is the only bird I know that seems to suffer from 
the use of the organs of voice. Little exertion as 
the few notes it makes use of seem to require, yet, 
by the middle or end of June, it loses its utterance, 
becomes hoarse, and ceases from any further essay 
of it. The croaking of the nightingale, in June, or 
end of May, is not apparently occasioned by the loss 
of voice, but a change of note — a change of object ; 
his song ceases when his mate has hatched her brood; 
vigilance, anxiety, caution, now succeed to harmony, 
and his croak is the hush, the warning of danger or 
suspicion to the infant charge and the mother bird. 
" But here I must close my notes of birds, lest their 
actions and their ways, so various and so pleasing, 
should lure me on to protract 
* My tedious tale through many a page 
for I have always been an admirer of these elegant 
creatures, their notes, their nests, their eggs, and all 
the economy of their lives ; nor have we throughout 
the orders of creation any beings that so continually 
engage our attention as these our feathered com- 
panions. Winter takes from us all the gay world 
of the meads, the sylphs that hover over our flowers. 
