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Updated: May 7, 2025
For the last time, perhaps, I listened to the mocking-bird and the cardinal, as by and by, when the grand holiday is over, I shall listen to my last wood thrush and my last bluebird. But what then? Florida fields are still bright, and neither mocking-bird nor cardinal knows aught of my absence. And so it will be.
"No," she laughed, "and if I go back with you to Wiggins to the little white cottage, you know, opposite the blacksmith's shop, you'll give me what you've got for me, won't you?" She dropped her head to one side and a mocking-bird chuckle rippled in her throat. "I shall count myself honored," said I, and we went, together and alone. Since those days men have made "fire-proof" buildings.
But ever through it all ran the song of the mocking-bird, and when the dreamer opened his eyes and stared through the vistas of the pine forest the cessation of its music first apprised him that he was awake.
She was something of a mocking-bird in her way, was the captain's widow. "I've taken quite a fancy to Edith," she added, "a minute more and I should have offered to give her the zebra kitty. But there, I shouldn't want to make a fuss in the family. That woman, her mother, to think of her talking so hard about cats! She doesn't look like that kind of a woman. I'm surprised."
But it affected the senses to a powerful degree, as in remote lands and in vast solitudes I have since found the note of the mocking-bird, suddenly heard, affects the listener half with delight, half with awe, as if some demon creature of the desert were mimicking man for its own merriment.
Yes, it was for that sort of thing the boys were so fond of her. But when Anna avowed a frank envy he laughed with a peculiar tenderness that thrilled both him and her, and murmured: "The dove might as well envy the mocking-bird." "If I were a dove I certainly should," she said. "Well, you are, and you shouldn't!" said he.
Like the robin, the mocking-bird seeks his food from the earth, sometimes digging it, but oftener picking it up. His manner on the ground is much like the robin's; he lowers the head, runs a few steps rapidly, then erects himself very straight for a moment. But he adds to this familiar performance a peculiar and beautiful movement, the object of which I have been unable to discover.
"Have I the pleasure of this dance?" he asked her finally, in a lull of the music. She bowed assent, and as if moved by a common impulse they strolled out of the dancing-room into the cool, quaint garden, where jessamines gave out an overpowering perfume, and a caged mocking-bird complained melodiously to the full moon in the sky.
Out of the wood burst forth a concert of song-birds, amid which the notes of the sweet-toned mocking-bird could be especially distinguished. To Carlos it was no novelty, nor was it to most of our companions; but Lejoillie and I were delighted. We had as yet discovered no trace of our friend. The few woodmen we met had seen nothing of him.
Again the afternoon hour, the white shell-paved court, its two playing fountains, the roses, lilies, jasmines and violets, their perfume spicing all the air, and the oriole and mocking-bird enrapturing it with their songs, although it was that same dire twenty-fourth of April of which we have been telling.
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