ela_ was there, and sounded his _yak_ two or three
times,--just enough to excite our hopes,--yet for some reason he kept to
_terra firma_. Perhaps he was aware of our presence, and disdained to
exhibit himself in the _role_ of a wooer under our profane and curious
gaze; or possibly, as my more scientific (and less sentimental)
companion suggested, the light breeze may have been counted unfavorable
for such high-flying exploits.

After all, our matter-of-fact world is surprisingly full of romance. Who
would have expected to find this heavy-bodied, long-billed,
gross-looking, bull-headed bird singing at heaven's gate? _He_ a
"scorner of the ground"? Verily, love worketh wonders! And perhaps it is
really true that the outward semblance is sometimes deceptive. To be
candid, however, I must end with confessing that, after listening to the
woodcock's "hymn" a good many times, first and last, I cannot help
thinking that it takes an imaginative ear to discover anything properly
to be called a song in its monotonous _click, click_, even at its
fastest and loudest.[23]

While I was enjoying the farewell _matinee_ of the fox-colored sparrows
on the 11th, suddenly there ran into the chorus the fine silver thread
of the winter wren's tune. Here was pleasure unexpected. It is down in
all the books, I believe, that this bird does not sing while on his
travels; and certainly I had myself never known him to do anything of
the sort before. But there is always something new under the sun.

"Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessell measured
The Amazon's huge river, now found trew?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?"

I was all ear, of course, standing motionless while the delicious music
came again and again out of a tangle of underbrush behind a dilapidated
stone-wall,--a spot for all the world congenial to this tiny recluse,
whose whole life, we may say, is one long game of hide-and-seek.
Altogether the song was repeated twenty times at least, and to my
thinking I had never heard it given with greater brilliancy and fervor.
The darling little minstrel! he will never know how grateful I felt. I
even forgave him when he sang thrice from a living bush, albeit in so
doing he spoiled a sentence which I had already committed to "the
permanency of print." Birds of all kinds will play such tricks upon us;
but whether the fault be chargeable to fickleness or a mischievous
spirit on their part, ra