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Not a bird peeped. Even the tireless vireo, who peopled the woods as the English sparrow the city streets, was hushed. I began to be anxious; could it be too cool for song? or too late? We walked steadily on, up the beautiful winding road: on one side dense forest, on the other lovely changing views of the hills across the intervale, blue now with approaching night.
"A temporary ministry; a limited exile; the one the measure of the other," sail Hilary Vireo, slowly thinking it out, and taking the book from the hand of his friend, to look over the words themselves, as he did so. "The glory is in the promise: 'he shall return into the land of his possession. His life shall be given back to him, all that it was meant to be.
As I was about leaving the woods, my hat almost brushed the nest of the red-eyed vireo, which hung basket-like on the end of a low, drooping branch of the beech. I should never have seen it had the bird kept her place. It contained three eggs of the bird's own, and one of the cow bunting.
Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, vol. v. p. 3. For the benefit of the lay reader, I ought, perhaps, to have explained before this that the Philadelphia vireo is in coloration an exact copy of the warbling vireo. There is a slight difference in size between the two, but the most practiced eye could not be depended upon to tell them apart in a tree.
The speaker's face flushed and glowed; Hilary Vireo, always glad and strong in look and bearing, was grandly joyful when the power of the gospel he had to preach came upon him; the gospel of a full, perfect, and unstinted hope. "Is that what you tell your simple people?" asked Christopher Kirkbright, fixing deeply eager eyes upon him. "Yes; just that. In simplest words, changed and repeated often.
It was a gathering up and renewal of all that had been holy in the resolves of either while they had lived apart; a joining of two souls in the Lord. Hilary Vireo would not have dared to lead to perjury, by such words, a common man and woman. It was enough for such to ask if they would take, and keep to, each other. Mrs. Megilp thought it was "so jumbled!"
Later in the same day I found another in a chestnut grove. This last was in a state of quite unwonted fervor, and sang almost continuously; now in the usual disconnected vireo manner, and now with a chatter and warble like what I had heard in the morning, but louder and longer.
I asked myself. And was it settled for the summer? Such an explanation seemed the more likely because I had found no solitary vireo anywhere else about the city, though the species had been common earlier in the season in eastern and southern Florida, where I had seen my last one at New Smyrna March 26.
In these two respects it suggests the solitary vireo, though it never reproduces the indescribably sweet cadence, the real "dying fall," of that most delightful songster. At the risk of a seeming contradiction, however, I must mention one curious circumstance.
At first he didn't hear it, and as usual Jenny Wren made fun of him for having such big ears and not being able to make better use of them. Presently he did hear it. The voice was not unlike that of Redeye, but the song was smoother, more continuous and sweeter. Peter's face lighted up. "I hear it," he cried. "That's Redeye's cousin, the Warbling Vireo," said Jenny.
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