rs have sailed back to
Kentucky, singing and laughing and kissing one another under the
enormous green umbrella of Nature's leaves, he still is beyond them
all in loveliness. But when they have been wafted away again to
brighter skies and to soft islands over the sea, and he is left
alone on the edge of that Northern world which he has dared invade
and inhabit, it is then, amid black clouds and drifting snows,
that the gorgeous cardinal stands forth in the ideal picture of
his destiny. For it is than that his beauty I most conspicuous,
and that Death, lover of the peerless, strikes at him from afar.
So that he retires to the twilight solitude of his wild fortress.
Let him even show his noble head and breast at a slit in its green
window-shades, and a ray flashes from it to the eye of a cat; let
him, as spring comes on, burst out in desperation and mount to the
tree-tops which he loves, and his gleaming red coat betrays him to
the poised hawk as to a distant sharpshooter; in the barn near by
an owl is waiting to do his night marketing at various tender-meat
stalls; and, above all, the eye and heart of man are his diurnal and
nocturnal foe. What wonder if he is so shy, so rare, so secluded,
this flame-colored prisoner in dark-green chambers, who has only
to be seen or heard and Death adjusts an arrow. No vast Southern
swamps or forest of pine here into which he may plunge. If he
shuns man in Kentucky, he must haunt the long lonely river valleys
where the wild cedars grow. If he comes into this immediate
swarming pastoral region, where the people, with ancestral love of
privacy, and not from any kindly thought of him, plant evergreens
around their country homes, he must live under the very guns and
amid the pitfalls of the enemy. Surely, could the first male of
the species have foreseen how, through the generations of his race
to come, both their beauty and their song, which were meant to
announce them to Love, would also announce them to Death, he must
have blanched snow-white with despair and turned as mute as a stone.
Is it this flight from the inescapable just behind that makes the
singing of the red-bird thoughtful and plaintive, and, indeed,
nearly all the wild sounds of nature so like the outcry of the
doomed? He will sit for a long time silent and motionless in the
heart of a cedar, as if absorbed in the tragic memories of his
race. Then, softly, wearily, he will call out to you and to the
whole world: _