alamode beef business is supposed to be carried on, I am blind. I have seen trees, and heard the blackbird whistle.
There is much significance, under the circumstances, in hearing the blackbird whistle. It is a proof that to me there was perfect silence. The peculiarity of this animal is, that he makes silence. The more he whistles, the more still is all nature beside. It is not difficult to imagine him a sort of fugleman, herald, or black rod, going between earth and heaven in the interest of either. Take a case: an evening in autumn. About six o'clock there comes a shower of rain, a bountiful shower, all in shilling drops. The earth drinks and drinks, holding its breath; while the trees make a pleasant noise, their leaves kissing each other for joy. Presently the rain ceases. Drops fall one by one, lazily, from the satisfied boughs, and sink to the roots of the grass, lying there in store. Then the blackbird, already on duty in his favourite tree, sounds his bugle-note. "Attention!" sings he to the winds big and little; "the earth will return thanks." Whereupon there is a stillness deep as—no, not as death, but a silence so profound that it seems as if it were itself the secret of life, that profoundest thing. This your own poor carcase appears to recognize. The little life therein—not more than a quart pot full—knows the presence of the great ocean from which it was taken, and yearns. It stirs in its earthen vessel; you feel it moving in your very fingers; you may almost hear your right hand calling to the left, "I live! I live!" Silence proclaimed, thanksgiving begins. There is a sensation of the sound of ten thousand voices, and the swinging of ten thousand censers; besides the audible singing of birds, the humming of beetles, and the noise of small things which praise the Lord by rubbing their legs together.
This bird seems to take another important part in the scheme of nature, worth mentioning.
Everybody—everybody at least who has watched by a sick-bed—knows that days have their appointed time, and die as well as men. There is one awful minute in the twenty-four hours when the day palpably expires, and then there is a reach of utter vacancy, of coldness and darkness; and then a new day is born, and earth, reassured, throbs again. This is not a fancy; or if so, is it from fancy that so many people die in this awful hour ("between the night and the morning," nurses call it), or that sick men grow paler, fainter, more insensible? I think not. To appearance they are plainly washed down by the ebbing night, and plainly stranded so near the verge of death that its waters wash over them. Now, in five minutes, the sick man is floated away and is gone; or the new day comes, snatches him to its bosom, and bears him back to us; and we know that he will live. I hope I shall die between the night and the morning, so peacefully do we drift away then. But ah! blessed Morning, I am not ungrateful. That long-legged daughter of mine, aged eight at present, did you not bring her back to me in your mysterious way? At half-past two, we said, "Gone!" and began to howl. Three minutes afterward, a breath swept over her limbs; five minutes afterward there was a blush like
