come.

"Come here! Come here!" He was on his mettle now. Surely no cardinal
could sing fuller, clearer, sweeter notes! He began at the very first,
and rollicked through a story of adventure, colouring it with every
wild, dashing, catchy note he could improvise. He followed that with a
rippling song of the joy and fulness of spring, in notes as light and
airy as the wind-blown soul of melody, and with swaying body kept time
to his rhythmic measures. Then he glided into a song of love, and
tenderly, pleadingly, passionately, told the story as only a courting
bird can tell it. Then he sang a song of ravishment; a song quavering
with fear and the pain tugging at his heart. He almost had run the
gamut, and she really appeared as if she intended to flee rather than
to come to him. He was afraid to take even one timid little hop toward
her.

In a fit of desperation the Cardinal burst into the passion song.

He arose to his full height, leaned toward her with outspread quivering
wings, and crest flared to the utmost, and rocking from side to side in
the intensity of his fervour, he poured out a perfect torrent of
palpitant song. His cardinal body swayed to the rolling flood of his
ecstatic tones, until he appeared like a flaming pulsing note of
materialized music, as he entreated, coaxed, commanded, and pled. From
sheer exhaustion, he threw up his head to round off the last note he
could utter, and breathlessly glancing down to see if she were coming,
caught sight of a faint streak of gray in the distance. He had planned
so to subdue the little female he courted that she would come to him;
he was in hot pursuit a half day's journey away before he remembered it.

No other cardinal ever endured such a chase as she led him in the
following days. Through fear and timidity she had kept most of her
life in the underbrush. The Cardinal was a bird of the open fields and
tree-tops. He loved to rock with the wind, and speed arrow-like in
great plunges of flight. This darting and twisting over logs, among
leaves, and through tangled thickets, tired, tried, and exasperated him
more than hundreds of miles of open flight. Sometimes he drove her
from cover, and then she wildly dashed up-hill and down-dale, seeking
another thicket; but wherever she went, the Cardinal was only a breath
behind her, and with every passing mile his passion for her grew.

There was no time to eat, bathe, or sing; only mile after mile of
unceasing