With almost everything earthly that he touches this high herald of the trees is in contrast.  Among his kind he is without a peer.  Even when the whole company of summer voyagers have sailed back to Kentucky, singing and laughing and kissing one another under the enormous green umbrella of Nature’s leaves, he still is beyond them all in loveliness.  But when they have been wafted away again to brighter skies and to soft islands over the sea, and he is left alone on the edge of that Northern world which he has dared invade and inhabit, it is then, amid black clouds and drifting snows, that the gorgeous cardinal stands forth in the ideal picture of his destiny.  For it is than that his beauty I most conspicuous, and that Death, lover of the peerless, strikes at him from afar.  So that he retires to the twilight solitude of his wild fortress.  Let him even show his noble head and breast at a slit in its green window-shades, and a ray flashes from it to the eye of a cat; let him, as spring comes on, burst out in desperation and mount to the tree-tops which he loves, and his gleaming red coat betrays him to the poised hawk as to a distant sharpshooter; in the barn near by an owl is waiting to do his night marketing at various tender-meat stalls; and, above all, the eye and heart of man are his diurnal and nocturnal foe.  What wonder if he is so shy, so rare, so secluded, this flame-colored prisoner in dark-green chambers, who has only to be seen or heard and Death adjusts an arrow.  No vast Southern swamps or forest of pine here into which he may plunge.  If he shuns man in Kentucky, he must haunt the long lonely river valleys where the wild cedars grow.  If he comes into this immediate swarming pastoral region, where the people, with ancestral love of privacy, and not from any kindly thought of him, plant evergreens around their country homes, he must live under the very guns and amid the pitfalls of the enemy.  Surely, could the first male of the species have foreseen how, through the generations of his race to come, both their beauty and their song, which were meant to announce them to Love, would also announce them to Death, he must have blanched snow-white with despair and turned as mute as a stone.  Is it this flight from the inescapable just behind that makes the singing of the red-bird thoughtful and plaintive, and, indeed, nearly all the wild sounds of nature so like the outcry of the doomed?  He will sit for a long time silent and motionless in the heart of a cedar, as if absorbed in the tragic memories of his race.  Then, softly, wearily, he will call out to you and to the whole world:  Peace.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_..!—­the most melodious sigh that ever issued from the clefts of a dungeon.

For color and form, brilliant singing, his very enemies, and the bold nature he has never lost, I have long been most interested in this bird.  Every year several pairs make their appearance about my place.  This winter especially I have been feeding a pair; and there should be finer music in the spring, and a lustier brood in summer.