Roosevelt liked the song of the blackbird so much that he was almost indignant that he had not heard more of its reputation before.  He said everybody talked about the song of the thrush; it had a great reputation, but the song of the blackbird, though less often mentioned, was much better than that of the thrush.  He wanted to know the reason of this injustice and kept asking the question of himself and me.  At last he suggested that the name of the bird must have injured its reputation.  I suppose the real reason is that the thrush sings for a longer period of the year than the blackbird and is a more obtrusive singer, and that so few people have sufficient feeling about bird songs to care to discriminate.

One more instance I will give of his interest and his knowledge.  We were passing under a fir tree when we heard a small song in the tree above us.  We stopped and I said that was the song of a golden-crested wren.  He listened very attentively while the bird repeated its little song, as its habit is.  Then he said, “I think that is exactly the same song as that of a bird that we have in America”; and that was the only English song that he recognized as being the same as any bird song in America.  Some time afterwards I met a bird expert in the Natural History Museum in London and told him this incident, and he confirmed what Colonel Roosevelt had said, that the song of this bird would be about the only song that the two countries had in common.  I think that a very remarkable instance of minute and accurate knowledge on the part of Colonel Roosevelt.  It was the business of the bird expert in London to know about birds.  Colonel Roosevelt’s knowledge was a mere incident acquired, not as part of the work of his life, but entirely outside it.  I remember thinking at the time how strange it seemed that the golden-crested wren, which is the very smallest bird which we have in England, should be the only song bird which the great continent of North America has in common with us.

But points of view are different in different countries.  We may find ourselves looking, not only at political questions, but at incidents in natural history from a different point of view when we are on different sides of an ocean.  The other day I was in a contemplative mood not far from Washington.  I was thinking what a great country I was in, how much larger the rivers were and how vast the distances, and generally working up in my own mind an impression of the great size of the country.  Then I happened to recall this incident of the golden-crested wren, and I found myself thinking, of course, in a tiny little island like Great Britain, where one cannot go in an express train at fifty miles an hour from east to west or from north to south in a straight line for more than fifteen hours without falling into the sea, the only song we could have in common with a great continent like this would be the song of the smallest bird.