The other day I met a little boy about seven years old carrying a basket
with some dozen snails in the bottom of it, and looking as if he had found
a wonderful prize.
"What are you going to do with them?" I said.
"Give them to our thrush. He cracks the shells and eats them, he does."
"Does your thrush sing?" I asked.
"Oh, yes!" he replied. "You can hear him all over the house."
The song of even a captive thrush is sweet indeed; but I would rather hear
its voice in a choir of birds singing in the woods.
The blackbird's clear note, like the thrush's, may be heard very early in
the morning, and on still evenings, as it "sings darkling" in some leafy
bower. Its eggs are bluish green, with dark spots, while the thrush's five
eggs are light blue. There are white blackbirds--if such a thing can be--in
the Alps, and occasionally in this country; with us you may know the cock
by its being very black, while the hen is brownish-black, and I think both
birds are best known by the "orange tawny" bill. But neither the blackbird
nor the thrush is so pretty as the "little bird with bosom red" of which we
are all so fond.
"Our thrushes now are silent,
Our swallows flown away;
But robin's here in coat of brown,
And scarlet breast-knot gay."
Some time ago I was reading the account which a boy, who had always lived
in town, gave of his first sight of a robin-redbreast. His master told him
to write for his composition all about a holiday which the boys had had
given them, so he gave an account of how he had gone for a long day in
the country with his father and his little sister.
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