arden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory
thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him when the
thermometer marked 15 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed
impregnably within, like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The
robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less
for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in
him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely
ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the
main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly.
He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the
catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as
muckle 's a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that
ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly
forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He
has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many successive
committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing
gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely exercises his
right of eminent domain. His is the earliest mess of green peas; his all
the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he get also the lion's share
of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones in
the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a momentary calm even to
the jaded victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one's
fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long
enough in the sun. During a severe drought a few years ago, the robins
wholly vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three
weeks. Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing,
seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming perhaps of its
sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself, with a score or so of fair
bunches. I watched them from day to day till they should have secreted
sugar enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would
celebrate my vintage the next morning. But the robins too had somehow
kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into
the promised land, before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at
least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from among the
leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill
remarks about me