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Even in this case he only laughed good-naturedly, and went out, whistling like a mocking-bird, to call the children round him. Toward the more wayward and impulsive Emilia the good lady was far more merciful. With all Aunt Jane's formidable keenness, she was a little apt to be disarmed by youth and beauty, and had no very stern retributions except for those past middle age.
Knight sing: one of the chiefs, wishing to testify his delight, plucked an eagle's feather, and sent it to her by the box-keeper, with the message, that "she was a mocking-bird squaw." Then the dream of the warrior took another direction, and he had visions, and saw sights, and the phantoms of things more congenial to his disposition than even the smiles of beautiful maidens.
No lark or linnet or redbreast or mocking-bird could live, much less warble, in those carbonic times. The world, like a Mississippi steamer, was coaling, with an eye to the needs of its future biped passengers. The embryotic earth was then truly a Niflheim, or Mistland, a dun, fuming region.
By day the cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed mocking-bird of America.
Another gloats over the number of Connecticut warblers a rare bird he killed in one season in Massachusetts. Another tells how a mocking-bird appeared in southern New England and was hunted down by himself and friend, its eggs "clutched," and the bird killed. Who knows how much the bird lovers of New England lost by that foul deed?
It is the bayou, even though it be invaded with the ruthless vandalism of the improving idea, and can a boat-house kill the beauty of a moss-grown centurion of an oak with a history as old as the city? Can an iron bridge with tarantula piers detract from the song of a mocking-bird in a fragrant orange grove?
Apply the compliment; it is a fine flower of Indian rhetoric," cried Pepe, exasperated. "Good! the whites are like the conquered Indians, insulting his conqueror. But the eagle laughs at the words of the mocking-bird, and it is not to him that the eagle deigns to address himself." "To whom then?" cried Pepe.
"Mah friends of the Green Forest and the Green Meadows, Ah wants yo'alls to know mah friend, Mistah Mocking-bird, who has come up from mah ol' home way down in 'Ol' Virginny. He has the most wonderful voice in all the world, and when he wants to, he can make it sound just like the voice of any one of yo'alls. We uns is right sorry fo' the trouble we uns have made.
Our crow also is a vocal mimic, and that not in the matter-of-course way of the mocking-bird, but, as it were, more individual and spontaneous. The tame crow already mentioned very readily undertook extempore imitations of words, and with considerable success.
Once, during John's wedding-trip, we had stopped one evening in a little country-town, and while we were there, talking pleasantly by the open window, a mocking-bird, caged before a house across the way, had struck up a perfect symphony of his rich and multitudinous song. Cornelia was delighted beyond measure, and seemed to yearn for the bird.
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