standing near the trees doing nothing, and as I came up to him he
turned towards me with a look which astonished me on his dull old
face--that look which perhaps one of my readers has by chance seen on
the face of a religious mystic in a moment of exaltation. "Those
little birds! I never heard anything like it!" he exclaimed, then
trudged off to his work. Like most Englishmen, he had, no doubt, a
vein of poetic feeling hidden away somewhere in his soul.

We also had the other kind of concert-singing by another species in
the plantation. This was the common purple cow-bird, one of the
Troupial family, exclusively American, but supposed to have affinities
with the starlings of the Old World. This cow-bird is parasitical
(like the European cuckoo) in its breeding habits, and having no
domestic affairs of its own to attend to it lives in flocks all the
year round, leading an idle vagabond life. The male is of a uniform
deep purple-black, the female a drab or mouse-colour. The cow-birds
were excessively numerous among the trees in summer, perpetually
hunting for nests in which to deposit their eggs: they fed on the
ground out on the plain and were often in such big flocks as to look
like a huge black carpet spread out on the green sward. On a rainy day
they did not feed: they congregated on the trees in thousands and sang
by the hour. Their favourite gathering-place at such times was behind
the house, where the trees grew pretty thick and were sheltered on two
sides by the black acacias and double rows of Lombardy poplars,
succeeded by double rows of large mulberry trees, forming walks, and
these by pear, apple and cherry trees. From whichever side the wind
blew it was calm here, and during the heaviest rain the birds would
sit here in their thousands, pouring out a continuous torrent of song,
which resembled the noise produced by thousands of starlings at
roosting-time, but was louder and differed somewhat in character owing