And if you ask a Micmac, deep in the woods, how the
grosbeak got his shield, he may tell you a story that will interest
you as did the legend of Hiawatha and the woodpecker in your childhood
days.
If the old male, with his proud crimson, be rare with us, his
beautiful song is still more so. Only in the deep forests, by the
lonely rivers of the far north, where no human ear ever hears, does he
greet the sunrise from the top of some lofty spruce. There also he
pours into the ears of his sober little gray wife the sweetest love
song of the birds. It is a flood of soft warbling notes, tinkling like
a brook deep under the ice, tumbling over each other in a quiet
ecstasy of harmony; mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much
softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to whom he sang.
Those who know the music of the rose-breasted grosbeak (not his
robin-like song of spring, but the exquisitely soft warble to his
brooding mate) may multiply its sweetness indefinitely, and so form
an idea of what the pine-grosbeak's song is like.
But sometimes he forgets himself in his winter visit, and sings as
other birds do, just because his world is bright; and then, once in a
lifetime, a New England bird lover hears him, and remembers; and
regrets for the rest of his life that the grosbeak's northern country
life has made him so shy a visitor.
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