Yet even he, sitting
at his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies (as
a little child once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, so
loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount
of soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, as a child
who has said its lesson, or got to the end of the sermon, gives a
self-satisfied flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep.
Character? I know not how much variety of character there may be
between birds of the same species but between species and species the
variety is endless, and is shown--as I fondly believe--in the
difference of their notes. Each has its own speech, inarticulate,
expressing not thought but hereditary feeling; save a few birds who,
like those little dumb darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem to
have absolutely nothing to say, and accordingly have the wit to hold
their tongues; and devote the whole of their small intellect to
sitting on the iron rails, flitting off them a yard or two to catch a
butterfly in air, and flitting back with it to their nest.
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