Here, too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable for
their rarity, and for the wonderful color--a shade deeper than is ever
seen at the North, I think--of the male's blue coat. In a small thicket
in the hollow beside the road were noisy white-eyed vireos, a
ruby-crowned kinglet,--a tiny thing that within a month would be singing
in Canada, or beyond,--an unseen wood pewee, and (also unseen) a hermit
thrush, one of perhaps twenty solitary individuals that I found
scattered about the woods in the course of my journeyings. Not one of
them sang a note. Probably they did not know that there was a Yankee in
Florida who--in some moods, at least--would have given more for a dozen
bars of hermit thrush music than for a day and a night of the
mocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southern
performer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as to
render a comparison absurd; but what I love is a _singer_, a voice to
reach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Norman
school,"--so he called it,--hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I had
called his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes," he
said, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'." My own
feeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor of
what has grown dear to me through early and long-continued association.
The difference between the music of birds like the mocker, the thrasher,
and the catbird and that of birds like the hermit, the veery, and the
wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of the
mocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I have
heard music at all.
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