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We heard many bird-notes, too, the cooing of doves and the call of a great brush cuckoo. Afterward we found that the Spanish guerillas imitated these bird-calls, but the sounds we heard that morning, as we advanced through the tropic forest, were from birds, not guerillas, until we came right up to the Spanish lines.

That afternoon Skag went into the edge of the jungle. It was a breath of promised land to him. He was almost frightened with the joy of it the deep leaf-etched shadows, the separate, almost reverent bird-notes; all spaciousness and age and dignity; leaves strange, dry paths, scents new to his nostrils, but having to do with joys and fears and restlessness his brain didn't know. Skag was glad deep.

It is in this mystical hour that you will hear the most celestial and entrancing of all bird-notes, the songs of the thrushes, the hermit, and the wood-thrush, and the veery. Sometimes, but not often, you will see the singers. I remember once, at the close of a beautiful day's fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just after sunset, into a little open space in an elbow of the stream.

The soft, whispered warble of a brown thrush added a certain under-tone which combined and harmonized both these, forming with them a rhapsody of a rippling, bubbling character impossible to describe, but constantly reminding one of running streams, and gentle water-falls, and coming nearer to "put my woods in song" than any other bird-notes whatever.

I do not even know what birds they were that sang in the spaces; but I was aware of a fringe of sparrow-chirpings sharply edging their song next the street; and where the squares were reduced to crescents, or narrow parallelograms, or mere strips or parings of groves, I suspect that this edging was all there was of the mesh of bird-notes so densely interwoven in the squares.

The air was full of bird-notes the plaintively pleading or exultantly triumphant cries of the mating season's joy and passion.

"Did he really say that?" cried Daisy, watching the bob-o-link, who sat swaying up and down on the green bough, and nodding his white-capped head at her in the most friendly manner. "Perhaps I didn't translate it rightly; for it is very hard to put bird-notes into our language, because we haven't words soft and sweet enough.

Flights of cockatoos screamed over their heads, and magpies gurgled in the thick shades by the water. Occasionally came the clear whistle of a lyre bird or the peal of a laughing jackass. Jim knew all the bird-notes, as well as the signs of bush game, and pointed them out as they rode.

When we try to visit that group of alders, where the colony lives, you will see for yourselves how nicely it is protected. "We welcome this Blackbird in the spring, because his is one of the earliest bird-notes.

Butterflies were flitting here and there through the riot of gold, and she heard faint bird-notes from the shadows of the trees, echoed by the more distant twitter of Larbi's flute.