to back it.

The one person of all the world in whom talkability is most desirable,
and talkativeness least endurable, is a wife.

A WILD STRAWBERRY

"Such is the story of the Boblink; once spiritual, musical,
admired, the joy of the meadows, and the favourite bird of
spring; finally a gross little sensualist who expiates his
sensuality in the larder. His story contains a moral, worthy
the attention of all little birds and little boys; warning
them to keep to those refined and intellectual pursuits
which raised him to so high a pitch of popularity during the
early part of his career; but to eschew all tendency to that
gross and dissipated indulgence, which brought this mistaken
little bird to an untimely end."

--WASHINGTON IRVING: Wolfert's Roost.

The Swiftwater brook was laughing softly to itself as it ran through a
strip of hemlock forest on the edge of the Woodlings' farm. Among the
evergreen branches overhead the gayly-dressed warblers,--little friends
of the forest,--were flitting to and fro, lisping their June songs of
contented love: milder, slower, lazier notes than those in which
they voiced the amourous raptures of May. Prince's Pine and golden
loose-strife and pink laurel and blue hare-bells and purple-fringed
orchids, and a score of lovely flowers were all abloom. The late spring
had hindered some; the sudden heats of early summer had hastened others;
and now they seemed to come out all together, as if Nature had suddenly
tilted up her cornucopia and poured forth her treasures in spendthrift
joy.

I lay on a mossy bank at the foot of a tree, filling my pipe after a
frugal lunch, and thinking how hard it would be to find in any quarter
of the globe a place more fair and fragrant than this hidden vale among
the Alleghany Mountains. The perfume of the flowers of the forest is
more sweet and subtle than the heavy scent of tropical blossoms. No
lily-field in Bermuda could give a fragrance half so magical as the
fairy-like odour of these woodland slopes, soft carpeted with the green
of glossy vines above whose tiny leaves, in delicate profusion,

"The slight Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads."

Nor are there any birds in Africa, or among the Indian Isles, more
exquisite in colour than these miniature warblers, showing their gold
and green, their orange and black, their blue and white, against the
dark background of the rhododen