ference or
inconvenience. Give me either a mountain-top or Broadway. Suburban
vistas are pitifully cramped.

That day it had rained, and I should have been additionally glad to stay
indoors. But Mrs. Harrington is a fervent naturalist, and she insisted
on taking me out to look at the wild flowers and listen to the
bird-calls. Both of these branches of nature-study, I am convinced, call
for an intensity of sympathetic imagination that I am incapable of
developing; and especially the bird-calls. Concerning the latter, I
feel sure that a great deal of humbug is being said and written. I mean
to cast no reflections upon Harrington or his wife. The only occasions
on which I have known Harrington to deviate from the truth have been, as
I have already pointed out, in connection with his train-schedules. And
as Mrs. Harrington does not travel to the city, even this charge will
not hold against her. And yet I cannot help feeling that neither of the
two really hears the catbird say "miaow" or the robin "cheer up," as
they pretend to. At the first twitter or chirp from some invisible
source Mrs. Harrington stops and with radiant face asks me whether I do
not distinctly catch the "pit-pit-pity-me" of the meadow-lark. I say
yes; but I really don't, and I don't believe she does. My explanation is
that Mrs. Harrington is a woman and consequently ready to hear what she
has been led to expect she would hear. As for Harrington, he is a
devoted husband.

For let us look at the matter with an open mind. Our alphabetical
representations of animal sounds are at best only rough approximations.
Most often they are not even that. They are mere arbitrary symbols. We
use consonants where the bird uses none, as when we give the name cuckoo
to a bird whose cry is really "ooh, ooh." Or else we put in the wrong
consonants, which is shown by the fact that different nations assign
different consonantal sounds to the same bird. We do not even agree on
the vowel sounds. What is there in common between our English
"Cock-a-doodle-doo" and M. Rostand's "cocorico"? And we need not go as
far as the animal world. See how the nations differ in spelling out that
elementary human sound which is the expression of pain or surprise, and
which in this country we hear as "Oh," and the Germans hear as "Ach,"
and the Greeks heard as "Ai, Ai." If the human vocal chords can be so
imperfectly imitated, what shall we say of birds speaking after a manner
all their own? For