Goldsmith says that all travelers agree that they have a little interrupted chirrup, but Labat asserts that they have a most pleasing melancholly melody in their voices, though small and proportioned to the organs that produce it.

It is known that a few of the more robust species of Jamaica and Mexico warble a pigmy melody, and Mr. Gosse says that the Vervain hummingbird of Jamaica is the only one known to him that has a real song, warbling in a very weak but very sweet tone a continuous melody for ten minutes at a time.

Bull the poet Rogers apprehended something more than is perceptible to the scientific consciousness, for he exclaims in The Voyage of Columbus:

Could the compressed, intense, vehement little sprite be expanded to the dimensions of the ordinary folk of air, would the magnified musical and physical representation be as entrancing as are the fleeting glimpses of the fairy and the elusive hints of melody that so nearly escape us now.

For this electric spark, like an erratic meteorite of topaz and ruby and gold,

hovering between heaven and earth in a mist created by its own prismatic wings, might almost be believed an exemplification of light itself as scientifically defined, "a form of radiant energy," and it is the nearest approach to a disembodied spirit that lies within the range of mortal vision. So while it is believed that its song is but a feeble twittering, it may yet be as much musician as it is bird, and emit strains of melody too exquisite and finely drawn for human apprehension, and of which the notes that reach us are but the deeper tones of a delicate and etherial ariose.

JULIETTE A. OWEN.