To make a bird-house of a pig-pen, to divide it between the pig and the bird--this is as far as Nature can go, and this is certainly enough to redeem the whole farm. For she has not sent an outcast or a scavenger to dwell in the pen, but a bird of character, however much he may lack in song or color. Phoebe does not make up well in a picture; neither does he perform well as a singer; there is little to him, in fact, but personality--personality of a kind and (may I say?) quantity, sufficient to make the pig-pen a decent and respectable neighborhood.
Phoebe is altogether more than his surroundings. Every time I go to feed the pig, he lights upon a post near by and says to me, "It's what you are! Not what you do, but how you do it!"--with a launch into the air, a whirl, an unerring snap at a cabbage butterfly, and an easy drop to the post again, by way of illustration. "Not where you live, but how you live there; not the feathers you wear, but how you wear them--it is what you are that counts!"
There is a difference between being a "character" and having one. My phoebe "lives over the pig," but I cannot feel familiar with a bird of his air and carriage, who faces the world so squarely, who settles upon a stake as if he owned it, who lives a prince in my pig-pen.
Look at him! How alert, able, free! Notice the limber drop of his tail, the ready energy it suggests. By that one sign you would know the bird had force. He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold; and he migrates only because he is a flycatcher, and is thus compelled to. The earliest spring day, however, that you find the flies buzzing in the sun, look for phoebe. He is back, coming alone and long before it is safe. He was one of the first of my birds to return this spring.
And it was a fearful spring, this of which I am telling you. How Phoebe managed to exist those miserable March days is a mystery. He came directly to the pen as he had come the year before, and his presence in that bleakest of Marches gave the weather its only touch of spring.
The same force and promptness are manifest in the domestic affairs of the bird. One of the first to arrive this spring, he was the first to build and bring off a brood--or, perhaps, _she_ was. And the size of the brood--of the broods, for there was a second, and a third!