brown-backed evening thrush singing its good-night song in a thicket of
scrub near by.

"O wheel-y-will-y-will-y-_il-l_!"

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