Around that corner of the little Delaware commonwealth, in a flat, poor,
sandy, pine-grown soil, Jimmy Phoebus rode by the stranger in the
afternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shining
upon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birds
whistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.
The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, and
insects' eggs in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breast
washed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat,
where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and back
are of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage is
something of the gamecock. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes in
the flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidence
has abandoned, and uttering, as he feeds, the loud sounds of challenge,
as if to cry, "Abandoned by man; pre-empted by me!"
Jimmy Phoebus also heard the bold, bantering woodpecker, with his red
head, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping a
tree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimics
the tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like other
voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs
always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with
his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the
woodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top
lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of
a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems
everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run
his bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brain
itself.
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