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It was a perfect afternoon, the air a-lilt with bird-songs, and full of the perfume of early flowers. Her husband was ploughing in a distant field, and surely would not return for an hour or two; what might one not do in an hour? She called her little friend, Petie, who was hovering about the door, watching for her.
There is something elusive, indefinite, neutral, about bird-songs that makes them strike obliquely, as it were, upon the ear; and we are very apt to miss them. They are a part of nature, the Nature that lies about us, entirely occupied with her own affairs, and quite regardless of our presence.
But it did not know it was a Mass of Corruption, and it did not wish to be a Mass of Corruption, and it never did any harm or wished any harm to any one, but just lay there all day long, and thought how beautiful the sky was, and how good and warm the sun, and how sweet the flowers were and the bird-songs, and thanked God with all its heart for having given it such a lovely place to lie in.
They can do anything they wish. Divo Pan is the divo who makes all the music that you hear out of doors, the music of the wind and the water and the bird-songs. But you must be careful never to praise his music aloud, lest Divo Apollone should hear you. He is the divo that makes all the music you hear on instruments on harps and violins and pianos.
Had they been riding through some dismal swamp, the landscape's influence would have accounted for all these terrors. But it was the pretty region of Western Indiana, containing hills and bird-songs enough to swallow up a thousand stories of toll-gate robberies in happy sight and sound. Grandma Padgett, indeed, soon put her ban upon the subject of caves and night-attacks.
Bare-footed I would scud like a hare through the dew, heedless of the sweet air of the morning, heedless of the few bird-songs about me, heedless even of the east, whose saffron might just be burning into gold, as I ran to gain the green hollow whence alone I would greet the morning.
The bird-songs seemed almost ecstatic, and the voices of the children, permitted at last to go out of doors, vied with them in gladness. "Let July and August yes, and bleak January bring what they may," I said to my wife, "nevertheless, this is Eden."
They can reproduce perfectly the sound of another bird's note, not as that bird utters it, but as it is heard, faint and low, softened by distance. They can also sing over bars of bird-songs in a low tone perfectly correctly, and repeat them in a high one. To give a rather striking example. Last spring the writer was in the Valley of the Eden, opposite Eden-hall.
Stern, feeling the May breeze upon his face, hearing the bird-songs in the forest depths, felt a well-being, a glow of health and joy such as he had never in his whole life known the health of outdoor labor and sound sleep and perfect digestion, the joy of accomplishment and of the girl's near presence. "I suppose we do live pretty well," she answered, surveying the remnants of the feast.
Murmurs of water and of breeze, faint odours, wandering streams of tepid air, stray bird-songs in fragment as when a door is opened and closed, the softness of moss, the coolness of shade, the glimpse of occult affairs in the woods life, accompany her as Titania her court.
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