call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of
sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and
distant purple hills--all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty
laughter of a summer day--that we were glad enough to let the birds do
such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard
or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal.

As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from
out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing
sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy
black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full,
saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the
sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush--sadder and stranger than any
nightingale--played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old
water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of
silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I
wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt
Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death
of Lincoln:

Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings to himself a song.

But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse,
two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life
was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like
the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between
whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink
called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of