"Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him with!" breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. "No doubt he's saying to himself: 'Shucks! Where's that hermit--or hermitess--'" merrily, "'with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?'"
"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?" pleaded the visitors together. "It's won-der-ful! We'll be as still--as still as a nun's chapel!"
And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which answered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock:
"the song complete, With such a wealth of melody sweet, As never the organ pipe could blow And never musician think or know!"
Carried beyond himself--perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit--he actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight, when--when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!
By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers a boiling kettle.
"Fegs! 'twas like to scald somebody wi' its daffy simmer," he explained apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur, used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills--so like, in many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed loch.
"My certy! but 'twas pretty to see yon _merle_, though!" he murmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. "Fine it minded me, ma'am, o' the time when I was a boy, huntin' like a nickum for the nests o' mavis an' merle--blackbird an' thrush--when I'd rise 'wi' lark an' light!' Fegs!" Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, "yon was a thing to make a sober body young again; a while agone I don't know but I was feelin' like the last o' pea-time; an'--an', noo, I'm a green pea again,... or I would be but for the one sair memory," added Andrew, the true-penny, under his breath.
"Yes--yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, and frightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!" complained Una, aggrieved. "Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?" she cried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practically engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick.