_February 12th._ The mocking-birds have a constant fascination for me—the charm of a complex nature which touches life on many sides. One can know a robin by heart in a single season, and predict with one’s eyes shut the doings of any one of the tribe; but a mocking-bird is a different proposition. His song throbs with the pure joy of living. It is the song of one in the world and of it, and rejoicing so to be; yet there is in it a haunting suggestion of aloofness, of mystery, of something beyond one’s ken. It is as if his joy had deeper foundations than sunshine and plenty; as if he had lived through pain, clear to the other side of it, and learned that it, too, is good. His powers of mimicry, I think, are greatly exaggerated. He does not really sing other birds’ songs, as his cousin, the catbird, does; he merely experiments with their notes—a stave from a thrasher here, a light-flung oriole measure there, a thrush note, piercing sweet, a bit of the wren’s summer trill. It is as if he would try life on all sides and look at it from every point of view; his ear is keen for the music from every throat. But always, through all this imaginative performance, he clings to the integrity of his own message. One may hear a catbird for an hour, and, unless one sees the blithe gray mime among the leaves, never suspect his real identity. But all a mocking-bird’s borrowed notes are woven into the texture of his own song, which wholly claims him as the melody rises, sweeping him with it bodily up to heaven, and carrying the listener’s heart with him. His is the rapture of open vision, feathered mystic that he is. Now, a bird like that one would expect to be a recluse, dwelling apart in cloistered green, afar from his fellows and from mankind; but the mocking-bird flatly declines that rôle. He is a bird of affairs, friendly and neighborly withal, a haunter of men’s doorways and house-vines, and a public-spirited citizen who rejoices to succor the oppressed. For he has a fine, full-fledged temper of his own, and any amount of fighting blood. He rarely seeks a quarrel; but if one be thrust upon him, either by aggressions attempted upon his own rights or by the call of another bird in distress, he accepts the combat with alacrity, and carries it joyously to a triumphant conclusion. And three minutes after the enemy is routed his voice floats down from the highest perch in the vicinity as if he were singing at heaven’s gate. He has fought for all he is worth, yet not a feather of his spirit is ruffled. * * * * * _February 15th._ When I can catch Grumpy and call him to his face by his right name, he always disappears; but blue devils are so very clever at disguising themselves, and at concentrating one’s attention on their instruments of torture!