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Updated: June 20, 2025
As we neared the mouth of the harbor a little breeze now and then wrinkled the blue water, shook the spangles from the foliage, and gently lifted the spiral mist-wreaths that still clung along shore. The measured dip of our oars and the drowsy twitterings of the birds seemed to mingle with, rather than break, the enchanted silence that reigned about us.
He put his head back and let it float over him and rest him. Tinkling brooks and gentle zephyrs, waving of forest trees, and twitterings of birds, calm lazy clouds floating by, a sweetness in the atmosphere, bells far away, lowing herds, music of the angels high in heaven, the soothing strain from each extracted and brought to heal his broken heart. It fell like dew upon his spirit.
Since Safti had spoken the music meant more to me. I tried to read the player's heart in the endless song it made. Trills, twitterings, grace notes, little runs upward ending in the air surely it was a boy's heart, and not unhappy. "It is coming nearer," I said. "Yes. Ah, it is Smaïn!" Safti's one eye is sharp. I had seen no one.
There were the birds flying about, cheering them with merry twitterings, as they sped from tree to tree, or perched in the boughs overhead, warbling ever their songs of gladness.
This was so extraordinary that I got up and went to him. As I looked a curious doubt came upon me. Could he be a stranger bird? That seemed out of the question as no stranger bird would have comported himself with such familiarity. No stranger surely would have come so near and addressed me with such intimate twitterings and well-known airs and graces. I was mystified beyond measure.
It was charming to hear the little happy twitterings of the downy babes, how they gobbled and sputtered and talked to each other over their repast, swimming to and fro as if they had been ducks of mature age and experience, instead of mere yellow fluffs of a day old; and, finally, they seemed to remember they had a warm, comfortable mother somewhere, and sought refuge under her kindly wings, where I left them exchanging confidences in little drowsy chirps.
I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it seemed to vanish. And now, life was returning to this thing and that on every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings, with twitterings, with a little start and stir. . . . I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged, feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge.
As a rule, she would have been ready to drop with fatigue after so many sleepless hours and such severe exertions; but to-day she felt as fresh as the birds in the trees by the roadside, which greeted the sun with cheerful twitterings.
The air hummed delicately, hummed with an alien element, hummed with something that was neither the susurrus of insects nor the music of birds. He moved onward slowly and quietly. The hum grew and strengthened. It became a sound. It divided into component parts, whistlings, trillings, twitterings, callings. Bird-like they were but they could come only from the human throat.
It was delightful not to hear for an hour or so the sullen thrashing of the rain; but to listen to the leaping of the fishes, the soft swirl raised by some water-rat, swimming stealthily among the rushes, the restless twitterings of the few still wakeful birds. An old corncrake lived near to us, and the way he used to disturb all the other birds, and keep them from going to sleep, was shameful.
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