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Silver-throated birds flooded the world with songs of love. The very air seemed full of beauty and passion and the glory and joy of life in the dawn of its fullness. Their arrangements had been hasty, but complete.
The woods surrounding Abbot's Manor were by no means depressing, they were not dark silent vistas of solemn pine, leading into deeper and deeper gloom, but cheery and picturesque clumps of elm and beech and oak, at constant intervals with hazel-copse, hawthorn and eglantine, true English woods, suggestive of delicate romance and poesy, and made magical by the songs of birds, whose silver-throated melodies are never heard to sweeter advantage than under the leafy boughs of such unspoilt green lanes and dells as yet remain to make the charm and glamour of rural England.
The happy voices of childhood singing Christmas carols; the laughter of youths and maidens strolling arm in arm through the streets; the cheery songs of merry-making negroes; silver-throated bands, with throbbing drums and gently-complaining flutes, playing martial airs; long lines of gleaming camp-fires, stretching over the undulating valley and rising hills like necklaces of burning jewels on the breast of night, this was what held them silent and motionless.
Having examined the evidence, we considered ourselves justly entitled to all the usual emotions in visiting the church of the parish, Santa Maria la Mayor. It was evening, and from a dozen belfries in the neighborhood came the soft dreamy chime of silver-throated bells. In the little square in front of the church a few families sat in silence on the massive stone benches.
No silver-throated bugles wake the night with "Lorena." No soft refrain of the "Suwanee River" melts all the hearts. It is not a gala evening, when "Maryland, my Maryland," rises in grand appeal. The now national "Dixie" tells not of fields to be won. It is a dark presage of the battle morrow. Behind grim redan and salient, the footsore troops rest from the day's indecisive righting.
There the green things of the mountain, Million-voiced, newly-born, And the flowers of the valley In their beauty's crimson morn; There the winged winds of morning, Spirits unresting, touched with fire, And the streamlets, silver-throated, They whose leaping steps ne'er tire!
On the right a bay-tree bending over the stream mingled the heavy odor of its flowers with the delicate perfume of a yellow jessamine vine that had overrun a clump of saplings on the left. From a neighboring tree a silver-throated mocking-bird poured out a flood of riotous melody.
If the white fleecy clouds in the blue sky, the murmuring sea, or the silver-throated bobolink swinging in the green leafy bough above her head, had only whispered to Daisy why he loved the flowers so well which bore the name of daisy, how much misery might have been spared two loving hearts! The gray, dusky shadows of twilight were creeping up from the sea.
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