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The Wise Man laughed to himself, and then whistled an imitation of the White-throated Sparrow's call at which sound Dodo promptly rolled out of her hammock and bumped into Nat, who was still lying in the grass; then both the children sat up and listened. "All day whittling whittling whittling," whistled the notes. "You ought to be further north building your nest," said Nat.
As they lingered at their meal, Asher glanced through the little west window and saw Jim Shirley sitting by the clump of tall sunflowers not far away watching them with the eager face of a lonely man. A big white-throated Scotch collie lay beside him, waiting patiently for his master to start for home. "I am glad Jim has Pilot," Asher thought. "A dog is better than no company at all.
There is a white-throated sparrow, on a little tree across the river, whistling his afternoon song "In linked sweetness long drawn out." Down in Maine they call him the Peabody-bird, because his notes sound to them like Old man Peabody, peabody, peabody. In New Brunswick the Scotch settlers say that he sings Lost lost Kennedy, kennedy, kennedy.
This was one of the very many things on the trip which made me wish I were a man. I could have had a closer look at the nest; I think I could have taken a photograph of it too. Now and then came the sweet, plaintive song of the white-throated sparrow. Towards evening it began to rain fast, and as if with the intention of keeping at it; so George called a halt.
But as time went on and no sign was ever found of the Weeoombeens, the black fellows became sure that the brothers had turned into the little white-throated birds which had sat on the bush by the hole, so, they supposed, to escape their vengeance. And ever afterwards the little white-throats were called Weeoombeens.
It goes about in large flocks and continually utters a cry, loud and plaintive and not in the least like laughter. The former may be distinguished from the white-throated species by the fact that the lower part only of its throat is white, the chin being red. The red-headed laughing-thrush has no white at all in the under parts.
They are like other species with which we deem ourselves well acquainted, but which suddenly appear in some quite unlooked-for time or place. The long-expected and the unexpected have both an especial charm. I have elsewhere avowed my favoritism for the white-throated sparrow; but I was never more delighted to see him than on one Christmas afternoon.
Asher hurried to the door, and as he opened it, Pilot, the big white-throated dog from the Shirley claim, came bounding in, so wet and shaggy he seemed to bring all the storm in with him. "Why, Pilot, what's the news?" Asher asked. "Jim's sent him, Virgie. He's done this trick often."
Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels motionless in the vivid blue. The sun is blazing now, but Arul runs unheeding. It is time for school she knows it by the sun-clock in the sky. "Female education," as the Indian loves to call it, is not yet fashionable in the Village of the Seven Palms.
The golden crowned kinglet and the winter wren, the white-throated sparrow and the brown creeper, all may be looked for between the 20th of September and the passing of the month, though as for the brown creeper those two ardent bird students, Frederic H. Kennard and Fred McKechnie have demonstrated that it is not a winter visitant only but an occasional all-the-year resident, they having found nests and eggs in the Ponkapoag swamp.
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