s is the voice of the
cuckoo. I confess to liking the muttering chuckle which, in an
unscientific mood, I have supposed to mean that an egg has successfully
been laid in a hedge-sparrow's nest. But the cuckoo's "word in a minor
third" is always delightful. The bird is neither more nor less of a
foreigner than a willow-wren, yet he has, in comparison to the wren's
subdued chromatic warble, a song so self-assertive, and a tone so unlike
our other birds, that one feels him an obvious exotic, a foreigner of so
glorious and dashing a nature that one is grateful to him for singing
among flat ploughed lands and monotonous hedges. I fancy the Welsh
proverb, "Who would have thought the cuckoo would sing on the turf-heaps
of the mountains," is a poetic reflexion of this thought.

Of the nightingale I have nothing to say, except to put on record a true
remark of Sir Charles Stanford's, viz., that he sings in a syncopated
rhythm. But, though I lived in a nightingale land, it is another bird
that most clearly brings back to me the country of my boyhood, I mean the
night-jar. He has something of antique mystery which I do not find in
the nightingale, as he purrs on his only note through the warm night.
There is something unknown and primaeval and vaguely threatening in his
relentless simplicity. Can it be that I inherit from a stone-age
ancestor both the fear and love of the bull-roarer?

Another bird that moves one in a very different way is the robin, of whom
it is hard to say whether he has more of tears or smiles in his
recitative. In comparison to the night-jar he seems like a civilised
human soul who has quite modern sorrows, and has half forgotten them in
quiet contentment with the autumn sunshine. The blackbird has a tinge of
the robin's sentiment, but it is over-borne by the glory of his song as a
whole, which is pure gold, like his beak.

The chaffinch is not an interesting person, and he is so numerous that
one soon becomes weary of him and his song. Let us hope that he
expresses his real nature in the building of his pretty nest rather than
in song. This must, I think, often happen, and to take an example from
human builders, it is not inconceivable that the architect of St. John's
College Chapel, Cambridge, may have sung delightfully. But there are
limits to one's faith, and personally I cannot imagine the desecrator of
Pembroke College in the same injured town of Cambridge practising any art
in a way that