“Hark, from the apple-tree in the field below, that note so full and ripe and mellow! ‘A robin,’ say you? No; nor an oriole. There is a distinct individuality in that song, which, while suggesting both these birds, still differentiates it in many respects as the superior to either, as though from a fuller throat, a more ample vocal source. It is one of the rarest, choicest voices among all our feathered songsters, in _timbre_ and volume surpassing the thrush, and in these qualities unequaled, I think, by any of our birds. Listen to the overflowing measure of its melody! How comparatively few the notes, and yet how telling!--no single tone lost, no superficial intricacies. Sensuous, and suffused with color, it is like a rich, pulpy, luscious, pink-cheeked tropic fruit rendered into sound. Such would seem the irresistible figure as I listen with closed eyes to the swelling notes--a figure entirely independent of, though certainly sustained in, the ornithological form pictured in the song, sitting quietly on an upper twig, with full plump breast as carmine-cheeked as the autumn apples now promised in the swelling blossom calyxes among which it so quietly nestles. I can see the jetty head, and quills splashed with silvery white, and the intervals of song seem spanned with rosy light as pure as the prism released from those upraised wings as the singer preens his plumage with ivory bill. This is the rose-breasted grosbeak, with his overflowing cup, his pastoral cornucopia, his musical horn of plenty.” There is something about the description of the piping of the frogs in the distant marsh which brings tears to the eye of him who reads it with a hundred boyhood memories to make it real. This is the passage which excited the admiration of the critic in the “Saturday Review,” and led him to say: “People must be strangely constituted who do not enjoy such pages as Mr. Gibson has presented to us here. It is not merely that he writes well, though he possesses a style that is full of felicities, but the subject itself is irresistibly fascinating.”