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Some Injuns is smart, an' gol ding their pictur's! they kin talk like a cat-bird. A skunk has a han'some coat an' acts as cute as a kitten but all the same, which thar ain't no doubt o' it, his friendship ain't wuth a dam. It's a kind o' p'ison. Injuns is like skunks, if ye trust 'em they'll sp'ile ye. They eat like beasts an' think like beasts, an' live like beasts, an' talk like angels.
The Cat-Bird is not an inveterate singer, and never seems to make music his employment, though at any hour of the day, from dawn until dusk in the evening, he may be heard occasionally singing and complaining. Though I have been all my life familiar with the notes and manners of the Cat-Bird, I have not yet been able to discover that he is a mocker.
We had much the same description of country to pass through as on the previous day mostly open prairie, with pine-barrens and occasional hummocks. I cannot describe each day of our journey. In the early morning we were aroused half an hour before sunrise by a wonderful chorus of birds and insects, the mocking-bird and cat-bird making the greatest noise.
Indeed, it is well demonstrated by our American ooelogist, Dr. Brewer, that the eggs of the Cat-Bird affiliate him with the Robin and the Wood-Thrush, all three being widely separated in this respect from the Red Thrush.
I had a dim sense that even this experience, interesting and educative though it was, could not be fairly regarded as a post-graduate course in matrimonial knowledge, and I ventured to say so. Jessica set her teeth and declined to discuss the matter further, resolutely turning the conversation to the neutral topic of a cat-bird which was mewing plaintively in a hedge behind us.
The movements of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That the same Cat-Bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree, that is the thing astonishing to me.
They heard a cat-bird singing in a near thicket as they left their camp. It reminded Bim of her favorite ballad and she sang it with the spirit of old: "My sweetheart, come along Don't you hear the glad song As the notes of the nightingale flow? Don't you hear the fond tale of the sweet nightingale As she sings in the valleys below? As she sings in the valleys below?"
Of course she surprised nothing which Nature had endowed with even the merest apology for eyes and ears; and a cat-bird in the choke-cherry bushes squawked at her derisively. Stealth was one of the things which Mrs. Gammit did not easily achieve. Staring defiantly about her, her eyes fell upon a dark, bunchy creature in the top of an old hemlock at the other side of the fence.
The canary, among foreign birds, and the linnet and bobolink, among American birds, are familiar examples of the first class; the common robin and the veery of the second; the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, and the mocking-bird, of the third; and the blue-bird, the pewee, and the purple martin, of the fourth class.
As for a marriage settlement, she knows neither the name nor the thing. In fact, marriage in her thought is a simple union of hearts, with no taint of anything mercantile about it. Happy cat-bird! She perhaps imagines that human marriages are of the same ideal sort!
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