Can anything be more lovely than a meadow in June, its tall grass overtopped by daisies, whose open faces,

One such I knew, despised of men as a meadow, no doubt, but glorious to the eye with its unbroken stretch of white bowing before the summer breeze like the waves of the sea, and charming as well to pewee and kingbird who hovered over it, ever and anon diving and bringing up food for the nestlings. When, to a meadow not so completely abandoned to daisies, where buttercups and red clover flourish among the grass, is added the music of the meadow's poet, the bobolink, surely nothing is lacking to its perfection.

Passing such a field one evening, I noted the babble of bobolinks, too far off to hear well, and the next day I set out down another path which passed through the meadow, to cultivate the acquaintance of the birds. It was a warm summer morning, near the middle of June, and when I reached the spot not a bobolink was in sight; but I sought a convenient bank under an old apple-tree, made myself as inconspicuous as possible, and waited. With these birds, however, as I soon found out, my precautions were unnecessary. They are not chary of their music; on the contrary, they appear to sing directly to a spectator, and they are too confident of the security of the nest to be disturbed about that. In a moment a black head with its buff cap appeared at the top of a grass stem, and instantly the black body, with its grotesque white decoration, followed. The bird flew half a dozen feet, singing as he went, as if the movement of the wings set the music going, alighted a little nearer, sang again, and finally, concluding that here was something to be looked after, a human being, such as he was accustomed to see pass by, taking possession of a part of the bobolink domain, he flew boldly to a small tree a few yards from me. He alighted on the top twig, in plain sight, and proceeded to "look me over," a performance which I returned with interest. He was silent only a few seconds, but the sound that came from his beak amazed me; it was a "mew." If the cat-bird cry resembles that of a cat, this was a perfect copy of a kitten's weak wail. It was always uttered twice in close succession, and sometimes followed by a harsh note that proclaimed his blackbird strain, a "chack!"

His utterance was thus: "mew, mew (quickly), chack!" and I interpreted it into a warning to me to leave the premises. I did not go, however, and after several repetitions his vigilance began to relax. He was really so full of sweet summer madness that it was impossible to keep up the rÔle of stern guardian of the nests under the veil of buttercups and daisies, which he knew all the time I could never find. So, when he opened his mouth to say "chack," a note or two would irresistibly bubble out beside it, as if he said, "You really must go away, my big friend. We cannot have you in our fields;—but, after all, isn't the morning delicious?"

After a long conflict between desire to sing and his conviction of duty as special policeman, which ludicrously suggested Mr. Dick in his struggle between longing to be foolish with David Copperfield and to be grave to please Miss Betsy, he fairly gave in and did sing—and such a burst! Everybody has tried his hand at characterizing this bird's incomparable song, but no one has fully expressed it, for words are not capable of it. Perhaps Mrs. Spofford has caught the spirit as well as any one:—

Expressing himself was so great a relief to my bobolink, after his unnatural gravity of demeanor, that he repeated the performance again and again. I say repeated it; I found that he had two ways of beginning, but after he got into his ecstasy I could think of nothing but how marvelous it was, so that whether the two differed all through I am not sure. It was every time a new rapture to me as well as to him. One of his beginnings that I had time to note before I was lost in the flood of melody was of two notes, the second a fifth higher than the first, with a "grace-note," very low indeed, before each one. The other beginning was also two notes, the second at least a fifth lower than the first, with an indescribable jerk between, and uttered so softly that if I had been a little further away I could not have heard it. It sounded like "tut, now."

Seeing that I remained motionless, the bird forgot altogether his uncongenial occupation of watchman, and launched himself into the air toward me, soaring round and round me, letting fall such a flood, such a torrent, of liquid notes that I thought half a dozen were singing,—and then dropped into the grass. Soon others appeared here and there, and sang it mattered not how or where,—soaring or beating the wings, on a grass stem, the top of a tree, hidden in the grass, or rudely rocked by the wind, they "sang and sang and sang."

Then for a while all was still. A turkey leading her fuzzy little brood about in the grass thrust her scrawny neck and anxious head above the daisies, said "quit! quit!" to me, and returned to the brooding mother-tones that kept her family around her. Tiring of my position while waiting for the concert to resume, I laid my head back among the ferns, letting the daisies and buttercups tower above my face,—strangely enough, by this simple act realizing as never before the real motherhood of the earth.

While I lay musing, lo, a sudden burst of music above my head! A bobolink sailed over my face, not three feet from it, singing his merriest, and then dropped into the grass behind me. Oh, never did I so much wish for eyes in the back of my head! He must be almost within touch, yet I dared not move; doubtless I was under inspection by that keen dark eye, for the first movement sent him away with a whir.

My next visitors were a small flock of six or eight cedar-birds, who were seriously disturbed by my choice of a couch. Evidently the green tent above my head was their chosen tree, and they could not give it up. Finding me perfectly silent, they would come, perch in various parts of the branches, and turn their wise-looking black spectacles down to look at me, keeping up an animated conversation the while. We call the cedar-bird silent because he has, as generally supposed, but one low note; but he can put into that one an almost infinite variety of expressions. If I so much as moved a hand, instantly my Quaker-clad friends dived off the tree below the bank across the road, as if, in their despair, they had flung themselves madly into the brook at the bottom. But I did not suspect them of so rash an act, and, indeed, in a few minutes the apple-tree again resounded with their cries.

Meanwhile the sun marched relentlessly on, and the shadows without and the feelings within alike pointed to the dinner hour (12 M.). I rose, and thereby created a panic in my small world. Six cedar-birds disappeared over the bank, a song sparrow flew shrieking across the field, a squirrel interrupted in his investigations fled madly along the rail fence, every few steps stopping an instant, with hindquarters laid flat and tail resting on the rail, to see if his head was still safe on his shoulders.

I gathered up my belongings and sauntered off toward home, musing, as I went, upon the bobolink family. I had not once seen or heard the little mates. Were they busy in the grass with bobolink babies? and did they enjoy the music as keenly as I did? How much I "wanted to know"! How I should like to see the nests and the nestlings! What sort of a father is the gay singer? (Some of the blackbird family are exemplary in this relation.) Does he drop his part of poet, of reveler of the meadows, I wonder, and come down to the sober prose of stuffing baby mouths? Are bobolinks always this jolly, delightful crowd? Are they never quarrelsome? Alas! it would take much more than one day, however sunny and however long, to tell all these things.

At the edge of the meadow I sat down again, hoping for one more song, and then came the crown of the whole morning, the choicest reserved for the last. A bird sailed out from behind the daisies, passed over my head, and delivered the most bewitching rhapsody I had yet heard. Not merely once did he honor me, but again and again without pausing, as if he intended to fill me as full of bobolink rapture as he was himself. His voice was peculiarly rich and full, and, what amazed me, his first three notes were an exact reproduction of the wood-thrush's (though more rapidly sung), including the marvelous organ-like quality of that bird's voice. I could have listened forever.

But when he had uttered his message he sank back into the grass, and I tore myself away from the bobolink meadow, and came home far richer and far happier than when I set out.