for aught I know, they may have
half recognized an old acquaintance. A bunch of quails ran across the
road a little in front of me, and in another place fifteen or twenty
red-winged blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat gossiping in a
treetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I saw
flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps,--like the traditional
militia company, all officers. _They_ did not gossip, of course (it is
the male that sports the red), but they made a lively noise.

As for the mocking-birds, they were at the front here, as they were
everywhere. During my fortnight in Tallahassee there were never many
consecutive five minutes of daylight in which, if I stopped to listen, I
could not hear at least one mocker. Oftener two or three were singing at
once in as many different directions. And, speaking of them, I must
speak also of their more northern cousin. From the day I entered Florida
I had been saying that the mocking-bird, save for his occasional mimicry
of other birds, sang so exactly like the thrasher that I did not believe
I could tell one from the other. Now, however, on this St. Augustine
road, I suddenly became aware of a bird singing somewhere in advance,
and as I listened again I said aloud, with full persuasion, "There!
that's a thrasher!" There was a something of difference: a shade of
coarseness in the voice, perhaps; a tendency to force the tone, as we
say of human singers,--a _something_, at all events, and the longer I
hearkened, the more confident I felt that the bird was a thrasher. And
so it was,--the first one I had heard in Florida, although I had seen
many. Probably the two birds have peculiarities of voice and method
that, with longer familiarity on the listener's part, would render them
easily distinguishable. On general principles, I must believe that to be
true of all birds. But the experience just described is not to be taken
as proving that _I_ have any such familiarity. Within a week afterward,
while walking along the railway, I came upon a thrasher and a
mocking-bird singing side by side; the mocker upon a telegraph pole, and
the thrasher on the wire, halfway between the mocker and the next pole.
They sang and sang, while I stood between them in the cut below and
listened; and if my life had depended on my seeing how one song differed
from the other, I could not have done it. With my eyes shut, the birds
might have changed places,--if they could have