ning and cruelty, and which has not even a song to recommend
him--no vocal accomplishment which by the greatest of license could
prompt a poet to exclaim,

"I hear thee and rejoice,"

without having his sanity called in question.

The cow-blackbird, it is true, executes a certain guttural performance
with its throat--though apparently emanating from a gastric
source--which some ornithologists dignify by the name of "song." But it
is safe to affirm that with this vocal resource alone to recommend him
he or his kind would scarcely have been known to fame. The bird has yet
another lay, however, which has made it notorious. Where is the nest of
song-sparrow, or Maryland yellow-throat, or yellow warbler, or chippy,
that is safe from the curse of the cow-bird's blighting visit?

And yet how few of us have ever seen the bird to recognize it, unless
perchance in the occasional flock clustering about the noses and feet of
browsing kine and sheep, or perhaps perched upon their backs, the glossy
black plumage of the males glistening with iridescent sheen in the
sunshine.

"Haow them blackbirds doos love the smell o' thet caow's breath!" said
an old dame to me once in my boyhood. "I don't blame um: I like it
myself." Whether it was this same authority who was responsible for my
own similar early impression I do not know, but I do recall the surprise
at my ultimate discovery that it was alone the quest of insects that
attracted the birds.

[Illustration]

Upon the first arrival of the bird in the spring an attentive ear might
detect its discordant voice, or the chuckling note of his mischievous
spouse and accomplice, in the great bird medley; but later her crafty
instinct would seem to warn her that silence is more to her interest in
the pursuit of her wily mission. In June, when so many an ecstatic
love-song among the birds has modulated from accents of ardent love to
those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is
shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud,"
the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the
bird homes which are blasted in her "annual visit?"

Stealthily and silently she pries among the thickets, following up the
trail of warbler, sparrow, or thrush like a sleuth-hound. Yonder a tiny
yellow-bird with a jet-black cheek flits hither with a wisp of dry grass
in her beak, and disappears in the branches of a small tree close to my
studio do