724 
It is interesting to note that this bird is 
quite lark-like in its color and markings, hav- 
ing the two lateral white quills in the tail and 
the suggestion of a crest on its head. The 
solitary skylark that I discovered several 
years ago in a field near me was seen on sevy- 
eral occasions paying his addresses to one of 
these birds, but the vesper-bird was shy, and 
eluded all his advances. 
THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. 
most screeching song of the oven-bird, as 
it perches on a limb a few feet from the 
ground, like the words, « preacher, preacher, 
preacher,» or «teacher, teacher, teacher,» 
uttered louder and louder, and repeated six 
or seven times, is also familiar to most ears; 
but its wild, ringing, rapturous burst of song 
in the air high above the tree-tops is not so 
well known. From a very prosy, tiresome, 
HERMIT-THRUSH. 
Probably the perch-songster among our 
ordinary birds that is most regularly seized 
with the fit of ecstasy that results in this 
lyric burst in the air is the oven-bird, or 
wood-accentor—the golden-crowned thrush 
of the old ornithologists. Every loiterer 
about the woods knows this pretty, speckled- 
breasted, olive-backed little bird, which walks 
along over the dry leaves a few yards from 
him, moving its head as it walks, like a 
miniature domestic fowl. Most birds are 
very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they 
run or hop upon the ground carry the head 
as if it were riveted to the body. Not so the 
oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as 
the cow-bunting or the quail or the crow. 
They move the head forward with the move- 
ment of the feet. The sharp, reiterated, al- 
unmelodious singer, it is suddenly trans- 
formed for a brief moment into a lyric poet 
of great power. I have seen the bird when 
this skyward impulse first seized him. A 
marked excitement comes over him (I am 
tempted to say her, because the bird always 
suggests the feminine, and the two sexes are 
marked alike); he begins hurrying up through 
the trees from branch to branch, uttering a 
sharp, rapid chirp, till before the top is 
reached he can hold himself back no longer, 
when he starts into the air, and fifty or more 
feet above the tree-tops breaks out into a 
ringing, ecstatic song. You hardly have time 
to turn your head and find him with your eye 
before he has delivered himself, and with 
folded wings is pitching down toward the 
earth again. The bird does this many times 
