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It is called a Mocking-Bird here, and it well deserves the name, for it is a real scoffer at the sorrows of other birds, which it laughs to scorn and turns into ridicule by parodying them so exactly. I never heard it attempt to imitate any of the Larks or Thrushes, although I have listened to it for hours.
He raised the stalks of the bushes, and supported them with clods of earth, while the thrushes chattered in the neighboring thicket, and seemed to call to him to make haste, they were so curious to come to examine his work as soon as he had gone. Père Maurice found in the house an elderly neighbor, who had come to have a chat with his wife, and borrow some embers to light her fire.
In the centre was a choir-desk made of cold veal, with a book of lasagne that had the letters and notes of the music made of pepper-corns; and the singers at the desk were cooked thrushes standing with their beaks open, and with certain little shirts after the manner of surplices, made of fine cauls of pigs, and behind them, for the basses, were two fat young pigeons, with six ortolans that sang the soprano.
Therewith he awoke and saw that day was dawning, and heard the minster clock strike three, and heard the thrushes singing their first song in the Prior's garden. Then he turned about and slept, and dreamed no more till he woke up in the bright sunny morning. Ralph Goeth His Ways From the Abbey of St. Mary at Higham
It is surrounded by trees, and a large elm growing in the very midst of the walls and arches flung a network of sun and shade over the crumbling stones. The murmur of the nearby Swale and the notes of the English thrushes filled the air with soft melody.
Down in the park the slumberous cawing of the rooks triumphed over the lighter-voiced caroling of innumerable thrushes and blackbirds, and mingled with the faint humming of a few early bees, seemed to fill the air with a sweetly blended strain of glad music. It was one of those mornings typical of its own season, in which the whole atmosphere seems charged with quickening life.
It would take a whole book to describe the butterflies; once in a while you scared up a big, wonderful moth, large as a sparrow; and the orchard was alive with doves, thrushes, catbirds, bluebirds, vireos, and orioles. When you climbed the fence, or a tree, and kept quiet, and heard the music and studied the pictures, it made you feel as if you had to put it into words.
"But, my dear child, the thrushes went to bed two hours ago!" "Yes," I answer, at once entirely nonplussed, "so they did!" "Where have you been?" she asks, in a tone of ever-increasing surprise. "Did you go farther than you intended?"
It was only when Mark was tired of listening to the translation of Horace that he called thrushes shrikes: when he was wandering over the cliffs or tramping beside his grandfather across the Rhos, he was severely sceptical of any rarity and used to make short work of the old gentleman's Dartford warblers and fire-crested wrens.
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