"Maybe you had too much to teach to it," Rhoda Holland said; "it ain't often they can speak, and they mustn't have much company to learn well. Uncle Meshach haint had no company but that bird for years. I reckon the bird got mad and lonesome, and jest hooted words at him."

"What is it saying now?" Tilghman asked. "See! it is almost convulsive in its attempts to say something."

The gray bird, as impressive as a poor poet, seemed nearly in a state of epilepsy to bring up some burden of oppressive sound, and, as they watched it, almost tipsy with the intoxicant of speech, fluttering, driving, and striking in the air, it suddenly brought out a note liquid as gurgling snow from a bird-cote spout:

"L-l-lo-love! love! love! Ha! ha! L-l-love!"

"Well done, old bachelor!" Judge Custis remarked, in spite of his fagged face, for good resolution and yesterday's unbracing had left him somewhat limp and haggard still. "He brings out 'love' as if he had made a vow against it, but the confession had to come. Many a monk would sing the same if instinct could find a daring word in his chorals. These mockers of Maryland were celebrated in the British magazines a hundred years ago, and I recall some lines about them."

He then recited:

"'His breast whose plumes a cheerful white display, His quivering wings are dressed in sober gray, Sure all the Muses this their bird inspire, And he alone is equal to a choir. Oh, sweet musician! thou dost far excel The soothing song of pleasing Philomel: Sweet is her song, but in few notes confined, But thine, thou mimic of the feathery kind! Runs thro' all notes: thou only know'st them all, At once the copy and th' original!'"

"That's magnificins!" Rhoda exclaimed, with quiet delight; "who is 'fellow Mil,' Jedge?"

"Oh, that's the British nightingale. These American mocking-birds surpass them as one of our Eastern Shore clippers outsails all the naval powers of Europe."

"I've hearn 'The British Nightingale,'" Rhoda said, with a flash of her eyes; "he was a blind man with green specticklers that sang at Nu-ark, ''ome, sweet 'ome' - that's the way he plonounced it - an' it affected of him so, he had to drink a whole tumbler of water, an' Misc Somers, spying around to see if he was the rale nightingale, she found it was gin in that glass, and told about it."

Rhoda made even the minister laugh, as she indented her cheeks and cast a sheep's glance at him and the Judge. He marvelled that such forest English could be resented so little by his mind, but he thought,

"Never mind, she may have had no more lessons than the bird, whose difficulty is even beautiful. But see! Mr. Milburn is wide awake. My friend, how do you feel?"

"Better, better!" murmured Milburn. "I cannot lie here any more. There is money, money, gentlemen, dependent on my getting about."

He started up with the greatest resolution and confidence, and fell upon his head before he had left the coverlets.