and chatters, the shrike calls sharp and determined,
faint but shrill calls descend from the swifts in the air. These
descend, but the twittering notes of the swallows do not reach so
far--they are too high to-day. A cuckoo has called by the brook, and now
fainter from a greater distance. That the titlarks are singing I know,
but not within hearing from here; a dove, though, is audible, and a
chiffchaff has twice passed. Afar beyond the oaks at the top of the
field dark specks ascend from time to time, and after moving in wide
circles for a while descend again to the corn. These must be larks; but
their notes are not powerful enough to reach me, though they would were
it not for the song in the hedges, the hum of innumerable insects, and
the ceaseless "crake, crake" of landrails. There are at least two
landrails in the mowing-grass; one of them just now seemed coming
straight towards the apple tree, and I expected in a minute to see the
grass move, when the bird turned aside and entered the tufts and wild
parsley by the hedge. Thence the call has come without a moment's pause,
"crake, crake," till the thick hedge seems filled with it. Tits have
visited the apple tree over my head, a wren has sung in the willow, or
rather on a dead branch projecting lower down than the leafy boughs, and
a robin across under the elms in the opposite hedge. Elms are a
favourite tree of robins--not the upper branches, but those that grow
down the trunk, and are the first to have leaves in spring.

The yellowhammer is the most persistent individually, but I think the
blackbirds when listened to are the masters of the fields. Before one
can finish, another begins, like the summer ripples succeeding behind
each other, so that the melodious sound merely changes its position. Now
here, now in the corner, then across the field, again in the distant
copse, where it seems about to sink, when it rises again almost at hand.
Like a great human artist, the blackbird makes no effort, being fully
conscious that his liquid tone cannot be matched. He utters a few
delicious notes, and carelessly quits the green stage of the oak till it
pleases him to sing again. Without the blackbird, in whose throat the
sweetness of the green fields dwells, the days would be only partly
summer. Without the violet, all the bluebells and cowslips could not
make a spring, and without the blackbird, even the nightingale would be
but half welcome. It is not yet no