My Garden Acquaintance | Page 6

name of migratory
thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him when the
thermometer marked 15 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed
impregnably within,(1) like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he.
The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value
themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of
vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too
largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school,
and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the
belly. He never has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins,
the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as
muckle 's a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever
came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly
forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He
has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many successive
committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing
gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely exercises his right
of eminent domain. His is the earliest mess of green peas; his all the
mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he get also the lion's share of the
raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones in the woods
that solace the pedestrian, and give a momentary calm even to the jaded
victims of the White Hills. he keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and
knows to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long enough
in the sun. During the severe drought a few years ago the robins wholly
vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks.
meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, seemed to
find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming, perhaps of its sweet Argos
across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I
watched them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar
enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would
celebrate my vintage the next morning. But the robins, too, had
somehow kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the
Jews into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I went with
my basket at least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from
among the leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees interchanged some

shrill remarks about me of a derogatory nature. They had fairly sacked
the vine. Not Wellington's veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish
town; not Federals or Confederates were ever more impartial in the
confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to
surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder
secret to her than I had meant. The tattered remnant of a single bunch
was all my harvest-home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my
basket,--as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle's nest! I
could not help laughing; and the robins seemed to join heartily in the
merriment. There was a native grape-vine close by, blue with its less
refined abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign flavor.
Could I tax them with want of taste?
(1) "For well the soul, if stout within, Can arm impregnably the skin."
*The Titmouse,* lines 75, 76.
The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive
fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world,
is unrivalled. There are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy
enough then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. But when
they come after cherries to the tree near my window, they muffle their
voices, and their faint *pip pip pop!* sounds far away at the bottom of
the garden, where they know I shall not suspect them of robbing the
great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.(1) They are feathered
Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look
rather shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green
of the fringe- tree! After they have pinched and shaken all the life of an
earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then
gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red
waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you
with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. "Do *I* look like a bird that
knows the flavor of raw vermin? I throw myself upon a jury