it caroled, as a naturalist has translated the wonderful, silver-sweet prelude of the master-singer of the woods, the nightingale of America, rising, trilling until--now--with the voice-throwing magic of the ventriloquist, its song seemed to come from quite another corner of the thicket, while girls' hearts melted in their breasts, as, climbing a maypole of ecstasy, the notes trembled--fluted--upon a gossamer pinnacle of gladness at the close of a perfect day. "Oh-h!" There was no breath in girlish bodies for more than the one answering note of passion. No wonder the Thunder Bird's nose was out of joint. Earth has a magic all her own. But was it ventriloquism at large? Had the hermit power to throw his melody right into the center of the ring of girls--so to answer himself? It was the visitors' turn now for a stupendous sensation. Almost as airy and flute-like, though not as liquidly sweet and soaring, were bird-notes which answered back from within the very halo of Pemrose herself; and she turned, with her heart in her throat, to see who--who had the thrush in her pocket. CHAPTER XI MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said. A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers! If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert! Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried away by a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside her own atmosphere for her fairy-land,--her golden crown of romance. "Wheel-y-will-y-will-y-il!" preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub. And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White Birch Group. "Who's doing it? Oh-h! who's doing it--answering?" breathed Pemrose Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn't altogether bad for her, either. "Oh! it's _you_, is it? Where's the whistle--the bird-caller's whistle?" "Here. Look!" A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the iris of her eyes--corresponding to the many freckles upon her small face, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm. In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody in the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermit himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly, a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him.