Читать книгу Birds and Nature Vol. 9 No. 5 [May 1901] - Various - Страница 4

THE HEART OF A DRYAD

I

It was an oak wood. A few hickories and chestnuts grew there, but the oaks ruled; great of girth, brawny of limb, with knotted muscles like the figures of Michael Angelo or Tintoretto’s workmen in his painting of the Forge of Vulcan. As to coloring, the oaks were of the Venetian painter’s following, every oak of them! In summer they were “men in green,” rich, vigorous green, with blue shadows between the rustling boughs; in early autumn, though russet in the shadow, the sunshine showed them a deep and splendid crimson, pouring through them like a libation to the gods of the lower earth, and to the noble dead, for the Dryad had a heart for heroes and all oak-like men.

Immediately before the great winds came, stripping them bare, and dashing silver cymbals to wild airs of triumph, they wore a sober brown, but it put on a glow, as of bronze or heated metal after a rain, when the sun’s rays smote them with shining spears smiting aslant with unwonted glittering. Under the moon or after a freeze they were all clad in steel, armor of proof, and mighty was the tumult, as of meeting swords, when the great boughs swung, and the long icicles fell upon ice below.

But these days were far off. It was summer, and a crystal brook slipped from level to level, singing its sweet water-song, and bringing cool water to bathe the feet of the oak which the Dryad loved and decked with green garlands. The orioles loved it, flashing here and there with rich red gold or flame-like orange on breast and wings and soft, velvety black on head and shoulders, splendidly beautiful as some tropic flower, they chose the end of an oak bough to hang their pensile nest. The male oriole shone in the sun, but his mate glowed with a duller hue, an orange veiled with gray, and mottled and spotted or splashed with white and fuscous and black, as a brooding creature should be that sits all day long amid the play of fleeting light and shade upon constant color. But both were beautiful in their strong and darting flight, and their labors of love.

The mother alone fashioned the nest, weaving it strongly of grasses and bark, of fibre, hair and string, and lashing it firmly near the end, a hanging cradle for the wind to rock at will and safely, and beautifully adorned with a fantastic pattern of green oak leaves, woven across, and aiding to conceal the nest itself. The eggs, four to six, were white, but marked with strange characters, sometimes distinct, sometimes obscure, a hieroglyphic of black or fuscous lines, over which the mother brooded patiently for many days. But the male oriole was not indifferent, even while the young were in the egg. He did not fear to expose himself upon an upper branch, where he could watch untiringly over the safety of the beloved nest and all day long, in bright or cloudy weather, floated down to his silent mate a song of courage and tenderness.

Ah, no shepherds in far-off Arcady ever piped more sweetly to their beloved than this winged lover! His note is wild and free, a touch of anxious pleading perhaps in the brooding song that one does not catch in the first triumphant cry of joy with which he flashes upon our sight in April, but inexpressibly sweet and liquid. It is essentially music of the pipes, like the soft airs blown by lips of happy children upon reeds cut from the brook-side in the first joyous days of spring, but it is different in its airy quality, as if a melody, unfinished, were floating far above our heads! They are loving house-holders, and, if undisturbed, will return, year after year, to the same nest.

Happy is the Dryad that dwells in an oak where the orioles build and sing!

Ella F. Mosby.