A Kentucky Cardinal | Page 3

a basket of grapes and
Thomson's "Seasons," after which there would be no further exchange
of hostilities. The younger daughter, being a school-girl, will
occasionally have to be subdued with green apples and salt. The mother
could easily give trouble; or she might be one of those few women to
know whom is to know the best that there is in all this faulty world.

The middle of February. The depths of winter reached. Thoughtful,
thoughtless words--the depths of winter. Everything gone inward and
downward from surface and summit, Nature at low tide. In its time will
come the height of summer, when the tides of life rise to the tree-tops,
or be dashed as silvery insect spray all but to the clouds. So bleak a
season touches my concern for birds, which never seem quite at home
in this world; and the winter has been most lean and hungry for them.
Many snows have fallen--snows that are as raw cotton spread over their
breakfast-table, and cutting off connection between them and its
bounties. Next summer I must let the weeds grow up in my garden, so
that they may have a better chance for seeds above the stingy level of
the universal white. Of late I have opened a pawnbroker's shop for my
hard-pressed brethren in feathers, lending at a fearful rate of interest;
for every borrowing Lazarus will have to pay me back in due time by
monthly instalments of singing. I shall have mine own again with usury.
But were a man never so usurious, would he not lend a winter seed for
a summer song? Would he refuse to invest his stale crumbs in an
orchestra of divine instruments and a choir of heavenly voices? And
to-day, also, I ordered from a nursery-man more trees of holly, juniper,
and fir, since the storm-beaten cedars will have to come down. For in
Kentucky, when the forest is naked, and every shrub and hedge-row
bare, what would become of our birds in the universal rigor and
exposure of the world if there were no evergreens--nature's hostelries
for the homeless ones? Living in the depths of these, they can keep
snow, ice, and wind at bay; prying eyes cannot watch them, nor
enemies so well draw near; cones or seed or berries are their store; and
in these untrodden chambers each can have the sacred company of his
mate. But wintering here has terrible risks which few run. Scarcely in
autumn have the leaves begun to drop from their high perches silently
downward when the birds begin to drop away from the bare boughs
silently southward. Lo! some morning the leaves are on the ground, and
the birds have vanished. The species that remain, or that come to us
then, wear the hues of the season, and melt into the tone of Nature's
background--blues, grays, browns, with touches of white on tail and
breast and wing for coming flecks of snow.
Save only him--proud, solitary stranger in our unfriendly land--the fiery

grosbeak. Nature in Kentucky has no wintry harmonies for him. He
could find these only among the tufts of the October sumac, or in the
gum-tree when it stands a pillar of red twilight fire in the dark
November woods, or in the far depths of the crimson sunset skies,
where, indeed, he seems to have been nested, and whence to have come
as a messenger of beauty, bearing on his wings the light of his diviner
home.
With almost everything earthly that he touches this high herald of the
trees is in contrast. Among his kind he is without a peer. Even when the
whole company of summer voyagers have sailed back to Kentucky,
singing and laughing and kissing one another under the enormous green
umbrella of Nature's leaves, he still is beyond them all in loveliness.
But when they have been wafted away again to brighter skies and to
soft islands over the sea, and he is left alone on the edge of that
Northern world which he has dared invade and inhabit, it is then, amid
black clouds and drifting snows, that the gorgeous cardinal stands forth
in the ideal picture of his destiny. For it is than that his beauty I most
conspicuous, and that Death, lover of the peerless, strikes at him from
afar. So that he retires to the twilight solitude of his wild fortress. Let
him even show his noble head and breast at a slit in its green
window-shades, and a ray flashes from it to the eye of a cat; let him, as
spring comes on, burst out in desperation and mount to the tree-tops
which he loves, and his gleaming red coat betrays him to the poised
hawk as to a distant sharpshooter; in the barn near by an owl