142 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



a small small bird voice. Every day when I went to 

 the well in the gardens to drink a tumbler of magnesia 

 water and sit there for an hour or so I heard the same 

 delicate wandering aerial sound, the thin plaintive 

 note of the same little bird, a willow-wren, which 

 had taken up its summer-end residence at that spot. 

 I do not mean a song; a little bird when moulting, 

 concealed in a thick shrubbery, has no heart to sing: 

 it was only his familiar faint little sorrowful call-note. 

 People came in numbers at certain hours of the 

 day to the spring and pavilion to drink water and 

 sit in groups chatting, flirting, laughing, or to pace 

 the walks, while the children ran and romped about 

 the green lawns or sailed their little boats on the 

 running water; and by-and-by the crowd would 

 begin to drift away as meal-time approached, until 

 the gardens would be silent and deserted. But the 

 small bird was always there, and though hidden 

 among the bushes where they grew thickest he was 

 not wholly invisible. At intervals his minute shadowy 

 flitting form could be discerned at some spot where 

 there was a slight opening among the dense clustered 

 leaves, seen for a moment or two, then gone. And 

 even when the place was fullest of people and the 

 sound of talk and laughter loudest, still at brief 

 intervals that faint, tenuous, sorrowful little sound 

 would be audible through it all. Listening for it and 

 hearing it, and sometimes catching a glimpse of the 

 small restless creature among the deep green foliage 

 near my seat, a curious mental change would come 

 over me. The sense of dissatisfaction, of disharmony, 



