To-day, Estelle, your special messenger, the Humming-Bird, comes darting to
our oriel, my Orient. As I sat sewing, his sudden, unexpected whirr made me
look up. How did he know that the very first Japan-pear-bud opened this
morning? Flower and bird came together by some wise prescience.

He has been sipping honey from your passion-flowers, and now has come to
taste my blossoms. What bright-winged thought of yours sent him so straight
to me, across that wide space of sea and land? Did he dart like a sunbeam
all the way? There were many of them voyaged together; a little line of
wavering light pierced the dark that night.

A large, brave heart has our bold sailor of the upper deep. Old Pindar
never saw our little pet, this darling of the New World; yet he says,--

"Were it the will of Heaven, an osier-bough Were vessel safe enough the
seas to plough."

Here he is, safe enough, not one tiny feather ruffled,--all the intense
life of the tropics condensed into this one live jewel,--the glance of the
sun on emeralds and rubies. Is it soft downy feathers that take this rich
metallic glow, changing their hue with every rapid turn?

Other birds fly: he darts quick as the glance of the eye,--sudden as
thought, he is here, he is there. No floating, balancing motion, like the
lazy butterfly, who fans the air with her broad sails. To the point, always
to the point, he turns in straight lines. How stumbling and heavy is the
flight of the "burly, dozing bumblebee," beside this quick intelligence!
Our knight of the ruby throat, with lance in rest, makes wild and rapid
sallies on this "little mundane bird,"--this bumblebee,--this rolling
sailor, never off his sea-legs, always spinning his long homespun