146 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



I could hardly credit my own senses, so beautiful 

 had seemed this subdued lyric from a songster we 

 regard as very inferior to some of the warblers in 

 delicacy and expressiveness. 



On another occasion I was walking across a furze- 

 grown common after dark on a very cold windy even- 

 ing in early April, when at a distance of about forty 

 yards from me a whinchat warbled the fullest, sweet- 

 est song I ever listened to from that bird. After a 

 brief interval the song was repeated, then once again. 

 Whether it was the exceeding purity of the sound, 

 so clear, so wondrously sweet, so unexpected at that 

 hour, or the darkness and silence of that solitary 

 place which gave it an almost preternatural beauty 

 I cannot say, but the effect on me was so great that 

 I have never walked by night in spring in any furzy 

 place without pausing and listening from time to 

 time with the pleased expectation of hearing it again. 



Probably in these two instances and in a dozen 

 others which I could cite the song was uttered by 

 chance at the precise moment when it would be most 

 impressive — when the conditions and the mood they 

 had induced were most favourable. But the sound 

 too may create the mood, as was the case in the 

 following instance. 



I have heard many wonderful blackbirds, for like 

 all songsters, feathered as well as human, they vary 

 greatly in merit, and pace Dr. A. R. Wallace, there is 

 such a thing as genius in nature, but I think the one 

 which most impressed me was just an ordinary black- 

 bird. I was staying at a farmhouse in the New 



