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"Angels begird me, Pretty Pierre, but it's little I'd like you for enemy o' mine; for I know that you'd wait for y'r foe with death in y'r hand, and pity far from y'r heart; and y'd smile as you pulled the black-cap on y'r head, and laugh as you drew the life out of him, God knows how!
"While I was making the drawings for the 'Silva, at the old Dwight house, I was in the habit of taking a turn every pleasant day in the gardens after my scanty lunch. On the 18th of May, 1887, in my daily round I saw a Wilson's black-cap for the first time in my life.
The bird of which he speaks, Wilson's black-cap warbler, is one of the less common of our regular Massachusetts migrants. I count myself fortunate if I see two or three specimens during its spring or autumn passage. My correspondent shall tell the story for himself.
All the morning he will sing; and again at evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn: but if his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mocked by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning that which it is, the fulness of joy and love. Milton's 'Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy, is untrue to fact.
To escape from its attentions, I have been wandering about the secluded valleys that seam this region. Streamlets meander here amid rustling canes and a luxuriant growth of mares' tails and creepers; their banks are shaded by elms and poplars Horatian trees; the thickets are loud with songs of nightingale, black-cap and oriole.
And what he has gone through may be too much for the poor wood wren's nerves; and he gives way; while willow wren, black-cap, nightingale, who have gone by the same road and suffered the same dangers, have stoutness of heart enough to throw off the past, and give themselves up to present pleasure. Why not? who knows?
"The next spring, as I was looking over my notebook of the previous year, I came upon my entry of May 18th, and thought I would be on the lookout for a black-cap on that date. Several times during the morning I thought of the matter, and after my lunch I sauntered into the rockery just as I had done the year before.
The foliage crimps up, the canes are dwarfed, and the whole plant has a sickly and often yellow appearance. The only remedy is to dig up the plant, root and branch, and burn it. A disease termed the "rust" not infrequently attacks old and poorly nourished black-cap bushes. The leaves take on an ochreous color, and the plant is seen to be failing. Extirpate it as directed above.
J , who was at work upstairs, and after explaining what I wanted, invited him to accompany me. We cautiously entered the rockery, and within a few minutes there flitted from a neighboring thicket into that very Spiræa bush my black-cap! I took out my watch. It was just half past one!"
When spring came again to the shell-torn fields near Verdun, we saw how Nature in places was reclothing the meadows in their mantles of green and around the ruined, tenantless homes along the Meuse, how the primrose and violet were covering up the scars made by unnumbered shells. The air was filled with the joyous notes of the lark, and the linnet and the black-cap warbled among the hedgerows.
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