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The chambermaid had not beaten it up well. One huge lump refused to be mollified, and each attempt to adapt it up some natural hollow in my own body brought only a moment's relief. But at last I got the better of this also and slept. Late in the night I woke up, just in time to hear a golden-crowned thrush sing in a tree near by.

Quinn said as they stood there gazing on the richness of the earth. Near at hand, they could hear the sound of a lawn-mower, leisurely worked by William Henry Matier, and while they waited for him to come into view, a great fat thrush flew down from a tree and seized a snail and beat it against a stone until its shell was broken.... "I suppose he'd spoil it, father!" Henry answered. "Spoil it!"

When a blackbird had made a good hole he came back to visit it at various times of the day, and kept a strict watch. If he found any other blackbird or thrush infringing on his diggings, he drove him away ferociously. Never were such works carried on as at the edge of that seaweed; they moved a bushel of it.

He was smaller than Melody the Wood Thrush, being about one-fourth smaller than Welcome Robin. He wore a brown coat but it was not as bright as that of his cousin, Melody. His breast was somewhat faintly spotted with brown, and below he was white. His sides were grayish-white and not spotted like the sides of Melody. "I heard you singing and I just had to come over to see you," cried Peter.

As the girl spoke, some bird among the evergreens uttered a shrill, plaintive cry, rather than song a sound which the thrush occasionally makes in the winter, and which seems to express something of fear, and pain, and impatience. "What does she say? can you tell me?" asked the child. "Pooh! that is a bird; why do you call it your sister?"

The misty brightness was already fading from the garden; the song of the thrush was no longer audible: he had flown away from the elder bush and from Rosamund. The coldness and silence of the day seemed to deepen about her. Welsley was fading out of her life. She felt that. She was going to begin again.

The birds were everywhere busy with their nests in the thickets; sometimes, in the quiet evening, long after the moon had risen and Kweek had ventured forth to feed, the robin and the thrush, perched on a bare ash-tree, sang their sweet solos to the sleepy fields; and, with the earliest peep of dawn, the clear, wild notes of the missel-thrush rang out over the valley from the beech-tree near the river.

Then the parrot said: "Men are not bad. It is only women who are bad and cruel-hearted." And they quarrelled. Then the two birds wagered their freedom with each other and went to the prince to have their quarrel decided. And the prince mounted his father's judgment throne, and when he had heard the cause of the quarrel, he asked the thrush: "How are men ungrateful? Tell the truth."

The beautiful song of Melody the Wood Thrush somehow filled him with sadness instead of with the joy he had always felt before. The very happiness of those about him seemed to make him more unhappy. Once he almost decided to go hunt for another home, but somehow he couldn't get interested even in this.

She was not tired, yet she would have liked to have lain down under the green panoply of the forest, where the wild flowers shyly raised sweet faces to be kissed, and lose herself in the forgetfulness of an eternal sleep; never to go back again to an Eden contaminated. But when she lingered the melody of a thrush pierced her through and through.