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"You are very ill, Ezra," said Mirah, sadly looking at him with more observation. "Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body," was the quiet answer. "Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other," said Mirah, with a sweet outpouring of her words, as spontaneous as bird-notes.
The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to bend their heads in prayer. And in our ears, louder than the vibrations of the hamlet bell, louder than the bird-notes and the tumult of the voluptuous insect whirr, there rang the thud, thud of cruel blows falling on quivering human flesh. The curtain that hid the life of the peasant-farmer had indeed been lifted.
It had no real need to seek that damp, artificial heat. We were in the very heart of that Creole summer-time when bird-notes are many as the sunbeams. The flowers were in such multitude they seemed to follow one about, offering their honeys and perfumes and begging to be gathered.
Overhead, never so light a breeze lisped never so faintly in the tree-tops; here and there bird-notes fell, liquid, desultory, like drops of rain after a shower; and constantly one heard the cool music of the river. The sun, filtering through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon everything a green-gold penumbra. The air, warm and still, was sweet with garden-scents.
The bird-notes which have the most familiar fascination are perhaps simply those most intimately associated with other rural things. This applies especially to the earliest spring songsters.
Some of them may dwell in that part of the world, the books affirm it, and I cannot deny it, but this I know: one whose eye is untiring, and whose ear is open night and day to bird-notes, may spend May, June, July, yes, and even August, in the haunts of Rocky Mountain birds, and not once see or hear either of our choice singing thrushes.
But I saw everywhere unfamiliar winged things, I heard unfamiliar bird-notes; new colors perplexed me, new shapes, nay, the very soil smelled foreign, and the water tasted savorless as the mist of pine barrens in February.
Every morning when I came slowly and quietly up the little path from the gate, bird-notes suddenly ceased; the grosbeak, pouring out his soul from the top of a pine-tree, dived down the other side; the towhee, picking up his breakfast on the ground, scuttled behind the bushes and disappeared; the humming-bird, interrupted in her morning "affairs," flew off over my head, scolding vigorously; only the vireo serene as always went on warbling and eating, undisturbed.
Out of the leaves come strange bird-notes, a strange silence broods over us; it is broken by strange rustlings and cries; it closes over us again strangely. Nature swoons in its glory of sunshine and weird music; it has put forth its powers in colossal timber and howling beasts of prey; it faints amid little wild flowers, fanned by breezes and butterflies. My heart beats in strange anapæsts.
A few bird-notes were in the air the scream of an eagle, the note of a whip-poor-will, and far away across the lake a dense flight of wild duck rose above a reedy river-mouth, black against a pale band of sky. They were close now to the shore, and to a spot where lightning and storm had ravaged the pines and left a few open spaces for the sun to work.
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