A Kentucky Cardinal | Page 4

is waiting
to do his night marketing at various tender-meat stalls; and, above all,
the eye and heart of man are his diurnal and nocturnal foe. What
wonder if he is so shy, so rare, so secluded, this flame-colored prisoner
in dark-green chambers, who has only to be seen or heard and Death
adjusts an arrow. No vast Southern swamps or forest of pine here into
which he may plunge. If he shuns man in Kentucky, he must haunt the
long lonely river valleys where the wild cedars grow. If he comes into
this immediate swarming pastoral region, where the people, with
ancestral love of privacy, and not from any kindly thought of him, plant
evergreens around their country homes, he must live under the very
guns and amid the pitfalls of the enemy. Surely, could the first male of
the species have foreseen how, through the generations of his race to

come, both their beauty and their song, which were meant to announce
them to Love, would also announce them to Death, he must have
blanched snow-white with despair and turned as mute as a stone. Is it
this flight from the inescapable just behind that makes the singing of
the red-bird thoughtful and plaintive, and, indeed, nearly all the wild
sounds of nature so like the outcry of the doomed? He will sit for a
long time silent and motionless in the heart of a cedar, as if absorbed in
the tragic memories of his race. Then, softly, wearily, he will call out to
you and to the whole world: Peace..Peace..Peace..Peace..Peace..!--the
most melodious sigh that ever issued from the clefts of a dungeon.
For color and form, brilliant singing, his very enemies, and the bold
nature he has never lost, I have long been most interested in this bird.
Every year several pairs make their appearance about my place. This
winter especially I have been feeding a pair; and there should be finer
music in the spring, and a lustier brood in summer.

III
March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with that
yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper air the
notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by faith, not by
sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing the unseen and
unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier might be startled by
the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown to him from the clouds.
What far-off lands, streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in? In
what soft sylvan water will he bury his tired breast? Always when I
hear his voice, often when not, I too desire to be up and gone out of
these earthly marshes where hunts the darker Fowler--gone to some
vast, pure, open sea, where, one by one, my scattered kind, those whom
I love and those who love me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.
March is a month when the needle of my nature dips towards the
country. I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of winter sleep,
stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet after
goblet of young sunshine. I must find the dark green snowdrop, and

sometimes help to remove from her head, as she lifts it slowly from her
couch, the frosted nightcap, which the old Nurse would still insist that
she should wear. The pale green tips of daffodils are a thing of beauty.
There is the sun-struck brook of the field, underneath the thin ice of
which drops form and fall, form and fall, like big round silvery eyes
that grow bigger and brighter with astonishment that you should laugh
at them as they vanish. But most I love to see Nature do her spring
house-cleaning in Kentucky, with the rain-clouds for her water-buckets
and the winds for her brooms. What an amount of drenching and
sweeping she can do in a day! How she dashes pailful and pailful into
every corner, till the whole earth is as clean as a new floor! Another
day she attacks the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last
October, and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be
sunned and aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will
go into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife
would brush down cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten up
like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you, joyfully,
"Now, then, we are all right again!" This done, she begins to hang up
soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to spread over her floor a
new carpet of an emerald loveliness such as no mortal looms