How the sumac banners bent, dripping as if with blood, What a mournful presence brooded upon the slumbrous air; A mocking-bird screamed noisily in the depths of the silent wood, And in my heart was crying the raven of despair, Thrilling my being through with its desolate, desolate cry "It were better to die, it were better to die.

There was an orange-tree, where a mocking-bird was wont to sing and a girl in white to walk, that the detectives wot not of.

The Mocking-bird has more power, the Red Thrush more variety, the Vesper-bird more execution, and the Bobolink more animation; but each of these birds has more faults than the Robin, and would be less esteemed as a constant companion, a vocalist for all hours, whose strains never tire and never offend.

The Mocking-bird gives up the attempt in despair, and refuses to sing at all when confined near one in a cage.

Hearing a mocking-bird in the garden, she went to the window and taxed his powers to the utmost, by running up and down difficult roulades, interspersed with the talk of parrots, the shrill fanfare of trumpets, and the deep growl of a contra-fagotto.

I declare, on my word, that I would rather hear you laugh, than listen to the finest mocking-bird in the world.

The girl gazed for some moments at the crimson and yellow trees, on which a murmurous laughter of mocking winds arose, at times, and rustled on, and died away into the psithurisma of Theocritus; and the songs of the oriole and mocking-bird fluttering among the ripe fruit, or waving up into the sky, brought a pleasant smile to her lips.

And as I go, from out the wood A mocking-bird calls clear, "Sweetheart, sweetheart," and I turn, Half hoping thou art here.

A mocking-bird near me (there is always a mocking-bird near you, in Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence.

The difference between the music of birds like the mocker, the thrasher, and the catbird and that of birds like the hermit, the veery, and the wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of the mocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I have heard music at all.

"If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of a mocking-bird against a European nightingale," says Mr. Thompson, "I should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile....

In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop overhead, "Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray," and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds could really do when they set out.

So we went the rounds of the garden,frightening a mocking-bird off her nest in an orange-tree,till my hands were full.

Once, during John's wedding-trip, we had stopped one evening in a little country-town, and while we were there, talking pleasantly by the open window, a mocking-bird, caged before a house across the way, had struck up a perfect symphony of his rich and multitudinous song.

" =265.= THE MOCKING-BIRD.

Even in the morning choir, when every little throat seems strained in emulation, if the mocking-bird breathes forth in one of its mad, bewildered, and bewildering extravaganzas, the other birds pause almost invariably, and remain silent until his song is done.

Of the insectivorous birds, some sixty or seventy species are found here, among which is the Mocking-Bird, in the middle and southern districts.

I call Mrs. Walters my mocking-bird, because she reproduces by what is truly a divine arrangement of the throat the voices of the town.

Naturally it has been my wish to bring about between this rain-cow and mocking-bird the desire to pair with one another.

" "Yes," I replied, "especially the humming-bird episode, and the mocking-bird digression, to say nothing of the doings of the hornet and the sparrow.

But when Anna avowed a frank envy he laughed with a peculiar tenderness that thrilled both him and her, and murmured: "The dove might as well envy the mocking-bird.

"Why don't yo' give a party fo' Mistah Mocking-bird?"

So, not knowing what else to do, off started Peter Rabbit to ask Ol' Mistah Buzzard where his friend Mr. Mocking-bird got such a wonderful voice.

The term may be rendered "the myriad-voiced," and was the common name of the mocking-bird, called by ornithologists Turdus polyglottus, Calandria polyglotta, and Mimus polyglotta.

"I am Judge Lee Sands's oldest daughter," said the sweetest voice I had ever heard, one of those mellow, rippling voices that start the imagination on a chase for a mocking-bird, only to bring it up at the pool beneath the brook-fall in quest of the harp of moss and watercresses that sends a bubbling cadence into its eddies and swirls.