Nor will the robins, after these aggressions, tolerate the jays elsewhere. They may be pecking at the foot of a tree when a jay alights noiselessly in its topmost branch. They see, apparently, through the top of their skulls; and one jay or six, it is all the same to them. They dash up with the _élan_ of a picked regiment, and again the jays shriek and fly. Not a jay has pecked on this lawn this whole afternoon, nor roosted while the robins pecked. Time and again they have sallied in from the pasture, and as often they have dashed squawking back. It is a strenuous life for the blue-coats: but it certainly keeps things peaceful for the rest. The wood-thrushes have ventured near today, and a pair of chippies have come up on the porch, almost to my chair. Yesterday evening a dozen mocking-birds were here on the lawn, singing singly, answering one another, and joining again and again in choruses that whelmed the grove in melody. I lay in the growing twilight listening to them and thinking once more of all that passes, and of all that can never pass, when suddenly through the closing dark came the wild, sweet song of the wood-thrush, the first I had heard this year: _U-o-lee! U-o-lee!_ The three notes form a perfect minor chord; and at their end a sudden spray of rapid tinkling notes, and the song again repeated, and again. They say the thrushes have two sets of vocal chords, long and short, and the double vibration accounts for the splendid richness of their tones. But when those wild, appealing notes call through the gathering darkness one thinks, not of anatomy, but of the _Sursum Corda_ in a church, and of all the souls who shrink before some cup of suffering and yet accept it, not merely with courage, but with clear vision of the joy beyond. Up from the brook the song came, and far out on the road it was answered: _U-o-lee! U-o-lee!_ What magic fills the haunting notes with subtle suggestions of human weakness, of trembling courage, of faith no suffering can slay? And when they ceased, the mocking-birds took up the theme and carried it, far into the moonlit night, to its inevitable and triumphant conclusion—the song of the victor on the heights who has conquered in the lowest depths. * * * * *