were driven to the upland. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my
grass field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in full
bloom, and, while I stood perfectly still close by, he would circle
away, quivering round the entire field of five acres, with no break in
his song, and settle down again among the blooms, to be hurried
away almost immediately by a new rapture of music. He had the
volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, and, like him, appeared to
be proclaiming the merits of some quack remedy. *Opodeldoc-
opodeldoc-try-Doctor-Lincoln's-opodeldoc!* he seemed to repeat
over and over again, with a rapidity that would have distanced the
deftest-tongued Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count
Gurowski saying once, with that easy superiority of knowledge
about this country which is the monopoly of foreigners, that we had
no singing-birds! Well, well, Mr. Hepworth Dixon(1) has found the
typical America in Oneida and Salt Lake City. Of course, an
intelligent European is the best judge of these matters. The truth is
there are more singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer
forests. These songsters love the neighborhood of man because
hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food is more abundant.
Most people seem to think, the more trees, the more birds. Even
Chateaubriand, who first tried the primitive-forest-cure, and whose
description of the wilderness in its imaginative effects is unmatched,
fancies the "people of the air singing their hymns to him." So far as
my own observation goes, the farther one penetrates the sombre
solitudes of the woods, the more seldom does he hear the voice of
any singing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness of detail,
in spite of that marvellous reverberation of the decrepit tree falling
of its own weight, which he was the first to notice, I cannot help
doubting whether he made his way very deep into the wilderness.
At any rate, in a letter to Fontanes, written in 1804, he speaks of