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The bird fills the yard with brilliant singing; she fills her room with her low, clear songs, hidden behind the window-curtains, which are now so much oftener and so needlessly closed. I work myself nearly to death in my garden, but she does not open them. The other day the red-bird sat in a tree near by, and his notes floated out on the air like scarlet streamers.
The wardrobe woman, after much coaxing and bribing, had been induced to lend the girls two of the property costumes, and Nance, with the help of several giggling assistants, was being initiated into the mysteries of the red-bird costume.
She caught the sound of the stream, and went to it. The red-bird retreated circumspectly, silently. She knelt at the banks and splashed the icy water over her face and throat, another red-bird, another wild thing pulsing and palpitating with life. Then she arose to the full height of her splendid body and looked abroad. The morning swept through her like a river and left her clean.
For the last half of this light-and-shadow month, when the clouds, like schools of changeable lovely creatures, seem to be playing and rushing away through the waters of the sun, life to me has narrowed more and more to the red-bird, who gets tamer and tamer with habit, and to Georgiana, who gets wilder and wilder with happiness.
I must stop looking at the red-bird, lying here and there under the trees, and listening to him as he sings above me. My eyes devour him whenever he crosses my path with an uncomprehended fascination that is pain. How gentle he has become, and how, without intending it, I have deepened the perils of his life by the very gentleness that I have brought upon him.
Squirrels barked at us from the trees; coveys of young partridges ran rustling over the leaves below, and the golden oriole, the blue jay, and the flaming red-bird darted among the shadowy branches. We hailed these sights and sounds of beauty by no means with an unmingled pleasure.
The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, and noisy but splendid plumed jay might be seen among the branches; the air was filled with beauteous sights and soft murmuring sounds.
And late this afternoon I went to town and bought a bird-cage. I was afraid the merchant would misjudge me, and explained. He scanned my face silently. To-morrow I will snare the red-bird down behind the pines long enough to impress on his memory a life-long suspicion of every such artifice, and then I will set him free again in his wide world of light.
The eye wanders delighted down long vistas and over sunlit glades. It is caught by the flashing of gaudy plumage, the golden green of the paroquet, the blue of the jay, and the orange wing of the oriole. The red-bird flutters lower down in the coppice of green pawpaws, or amidst the amber leaflets of the beechen thicket.
Thus, he often repeats the song of the Red-bird, but in doing this he varies his own notes no more than he might do without meaning any imitation. Though he repeats but few notes, he utters them with great variety of modulation. Sometimes for several days he confines himself to a single strain, and afterwards for about an equal space of time he will adopt another strain.
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