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I knowed he wuz a callin' Nimbus an' dat Nimbus 'ud know it, tu, jest ez soon ez he heerd it; but yer know ennybody dat hadn't heerd it over an offen, wouldn't nebber tink dat it warn't a mocker waked up by de light, or jes mockin' a cat-bird an' rain-crow, an' de like, in his dreams, ez dey say dey does when de moon shines, yer know."
When other birds are cheerily out-of-doors, on some bright morning of May or June, one will often discover a solitary Cat-Bird sitting concealed in the middle of a dense bush, and twittering busily, in subdued rehearsal, the whole copious variety of his lay, practising trills and preparing half-imitations, which, at some other time, sitting on the topmost twig, he shall hilariously seem to improvise before all the world.
Instead of one there were half a dozen songsters aloft; we were so near their cages that the cat-bird whistled, to call his master and mistress to witness the intrusion of these strangers. The master brought a hot iron along he was a tailor and was just in the act of pressing a seam. His wife was scraping carrots, and she tucked her bowl between her knees as she came to stand and gaze across.
I recall, for example, the heightened interest with which I beheld my first Boston cat-bird; standing on the back of one of the seats in the Garden, steadying himself with oscillations of his tail, a conveniently long balance-pole, while he peeped curiously down into a geranium bed, within the leafy seclusion of which he presently disappeared.
A cat-bird first, with witching low song, eying me closely with that calm, dark eye of his, the while he poured it out from a shrub, "Like dripping water falling slow Round mossy rooks, in music rare;"
"My conscience is all easy, so far as you are concerned, sir; your self-esteem is too deep-rooted to suffer much from my poor little nips they produce no more impression than a cat-bird pecking at the cones of that spruce-tree yonder. Now don't you put your hand where your heart is supposed to be there's nobody at home there, you know.
"Isn't that delicious?" he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace with his. The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together.
The bird was perhaps the most intelligent one I ever watched, the cat-bird being his only rival in that regard.
After my brief semi-daily bath, I sit here for a bit, the brook musically brawling, to the chromatic tones of a fretful cat-bird somewhere off in the bushes. On my walk hither two hours since, through fields and the old lane, I stopt to view, now the sky, now the mile-off woods on the hill, and now the apple orchards. What a contrast from New York's or Philadelphia's streets! July 14.
Well, I wish you could have seen how quickly the mamma cat-bird and her kittie-birds gathered a lot of sticks, and twigs, and laid them together crossways on the water in that fountain basin, until they had a regular little boat.
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