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I couldn't possibly eat all the things myself, and if you'll bring chafing-dishes and spoons, and those things, I'll cook it, and we can sit round my open fire." Miss Thrasher's room was homelike, with its fire of white-birch and its easy chairs, and Miss Thrasher herself proved to be a pleasant hostess.
As for the thrasher's smile-provoking gutturals, I recall that even in the symphonies of the greatest of masters there are here and there quaint bassoon phrases, which have, and doubtless were intended to have, a somewhat whimsical effect; and remembering this, I am ready to own that I was less wise than I thought myself when I found so much fault with the thrush's performance.
But I'll tell you a thing right now that'll help you to remember mighty nigh every bird lays a egg that's mighty nigh like the bird herself. The cat bird's eggs is sorter blue an' the wood-pecker's is white, like his wing, an' the thrasher's is mottled like his breast." Ben Butler was hitched to the old buggy and the Bishop drove up.
Probably he supposed that his hour was come; but I had no evil designs upon him, he was not to be drowned in alcohol at present. Walking homeward I heard the robin's scream now and again; but the thrasher's was the last song, as it deserved to be." Two days later I find the following: "Into the woods by the Old Road.
The thrasher's the boy with the wallop. He's the boy that chases the whale, and leaps high out of the water, and snaps his long, limber tail, and bam! down he comes on that big slob of a whale and breaks his back. All the wise old whales, they take to deep water when they see a thrasher hunting trouble. It's the foolish young whales that don't know enough to let the thrasher alone."
But the red berries on yonder tall tree seem as if they would still remind us of brighter things; and the stroke of the thrasher's flail awakes the thought how much of nourishment and life lie buried in the sickled ear."
The nest is somewhere on the outer circle of his song; he is never so imprudent as to take up his stand very near it. The artists who draw those cosy little pictures of a brooding mother-bird with the male perched but a yard away in full song, do not copy from nature. The thrasher's nest I found thirty or forty rods from the point where the male was wont to indulge in his brilliant recitative.
In the South and West the thrasher also nests in the vicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for him in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go with the thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that goes with the catbird's I have seen her perch on the rim of another bird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once.
"The Thrasher's song is like some one talking cheerfully; the Meadowlark's is flute-like; the Oriole's is more like clarion notes; the Bobolink bubbles over like a babbling brook; while the dear little brown striped Song Sparrow, who is with us in hedge and garden all the year, sings pleasant home-like ballads."
When the children had finished applauding Olive's poetry or was it really the Thrasher's own performance? the Doctor went on: "We have seen that the West has one sort of a Thrasher in the sage-brush, and the East another, in our own gardens. I also told you that these birds were a kind of overgrown Wren; and before we call upon Mrs.
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