I had time to note before I was lost in the flood of
melody was of two notes, the second a fifth higher than the first, with
a "grace-note," very low indeed, before each one. The other beginning
was also two notes, the second at least a fifth lower than the first,
with an indescribable jerk between, and uttered so softly that if I had
been a little further away I could not have heard it. It sounded like
"tut, now."

Seeing that I remained motionless, the bird forgot altogether his
uncongenial occupation of watchman, and launched himself into the air
toward me, soaring round and round me, letting fall such a flood, such a
torrent, of liquid notes that I thought half a dozen were singing,--and
then dropped into the grass. Soon others appeared here and there, and
sang it mattered not how or where,--soaring or beating the wings, on a
grass stem, the top of a tree, hidden in the grass, or rudely rocked by
the wind, they "sang and sang and sang."

Then for a while all was still. A turkey leading her fuzzy little brood
about in the grass thrust her scrawny neck and anxious head above the
daisies, said "quit! quit!" to me, and returned to the brooding
mother-tones that kept her family around her. Tiring of my position
while waiting for the concert to resume, I laid my head back among the
ferns, letting the daisies and buttercups tower above my
face,--strangely enough, by this simple act realizing as never before
the real motherhood of the earth.

While I lay musing, lo, a sudden burst of music above my head! A
bobolink sailed over my face, not three feet from it, singing his
merriest, and then dropped into the grass behind me. Oh, never did I so
much wish for eyes in the back of my head! He must be almost within
touch, yet I dared not move; doubtless I was under inspection by that
keen dark eye, for the first movement sent him away with a whir.

My next visitors were a small flock of six or eight cedar-birds, who
were seriously disturbed by my choice of a couch. Evidently the green
tent above my head was their chosen tree, and they could not give it up.
Finding me perfectly silent, they would come, perch in various parts of
the branches, and turn their wise-looking black spectacles down to look
at me, keeping up an animated conversation the while. We call the
cedar-bird silent because he has, as generally supposed, but one low
note; but he can put into that one an almost infinite variety of
expressions. If I so much as move