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The creeping pace, the languid warmth of the afternoon, the scent of flowering trees, the ceaseless singing of redbird, catbird, robin, and thrush, made it drowsy in the forest.
"There's nothing the matter with you!" he cried. "There isn't anybody that can imitate my songs unless it's one of the Bobolink family. I sing too fast for you that's the trouble." Well, Mr. Catbird looked vastly relieved. "I'm glad to know that," he said. "And I'll never try to mock you again." "I should hope not!" Mrs. Bobolink told him. "For I never heard such a frightful noise in all my days."
Toward the end of the month, when the gelatinous masses in the water courses have developed the little black dots sufficiently so that we can see they are tadpoles, when the songsters have been joined by the catbird, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the woodthrush, the whippoorwill, the cheerful and friendly chewink and several of the warblers and flycatchers, the rivers and creeks will be fringed with the brilliant yellow of the marsh marigold, and we shall think of Shakespeare, walking the meadows of Avon, getting material for that song of the musicians in Cymbeline: And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes.
But soon we drew out of the hot sunshine into the old orchard with its paltry display of deformed, green, runt apples, and its magnificent columns and canopies of poison ivy that most beautiful and least amiable of our indigenous plants; and then we got among scale-bark hickories, and there was one that had been fluted from top to bottom by a stroke of lightning; and here the little red squirrels were most unusually abundant and indignant; and there was a catbird that miauled exactly like a cat; and there was a spring among the roots of one great tree, and a broken teacup half buried in the sand at the bottom.
"Lady," returned the scout, solemnly, "I have listened to all the sounds of the woods for thirty years, as a man will listen, whose life and death depend on the quickness of his ears. There is no whine of the panther, no whistle of the catbird, nor any invention of the devilish Mingos, that can cheat me!
That made Mister Catbird laugh, and then he made a noise like a cat, and the little robins were very much surprised to see a nice-looking bird like Mister Catbird who could make a noise almost exactly like a cat. Mister Catbird was a jolly person, and he was full of jokes.
"Lady," returned the scout, solemnly, "I have listened to all the sounds of the woods for thirty years, as a man will listen whose life and death depend on the quickness of his ears. There is no whine of the panther, no whistle of the catbird, nor any invention of the devilish Mingoes, that can cheat me!
The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate, but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of a young bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight on a near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender, beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to her first brood.
Thickly-prickled stems of green-brier, the wild smilax, rise to the height of the choke-cherry shrubs and the branches lift themselves by means of two tendrils on each leaf-stalk to the most favorable positions for the sunlight. Under these broad leaves the catbird is concealed. Elegant epicurean, he is sampling the ripening choke-cherries.
It is a very small bird, and has a long, facile, slender tail. Its song is a lisping, chattering, incoherent warble, now faintly reminding one of the goldfinch, now of a miniature catbird, then of a tiny yellow-hammer, having much variety, but no unity and little cadence.
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